Of the 14 countries in the analysis, all except two experienced drops in manufacturing unit labor costs in 1998. Unit labor costs rose by 5.9 percent in the United Kingdom and by 0.2 percent in the United States. In these comparisons, unit labor costs are measured on a U.S. dollar basis and are strongly affected by changes in exchange rates. In a number of cases, exchange rate depreciation was large enough to overcome an increase in national-currency unit labor costs and result in a drop in costs when expressed in U.S. dollars. These data are a product of the BLS Foreign Labor Statistics program.
Data are preliminary and subject to revision.
Unit labor costs also can be expressed as the ratio of hourly compensation to labor productivity. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an agency within the U.S. Department of Labor .