Notation and methodological comments (labour costs in the EU candidate countries for 2000 (euro / hour))

In accordance with the Regulation 530/1999 of the European Commission, Eurostat presented in February 2003 harmonized figures for the year 2000 on labour costs for 13 of the 15 EU member states. The 13 countries are

DK - Denmark

D - Germany

EL - Greece

E - Spain

F - France

IRL - Ireland

L - Luxembourg

NL - Netherlands

A - Austria

P - Portugal

FIN - Finland

S - Sweden

UK - United Kingdom

The labour costs for these countries are broken down to different economic activities. We confine here to the the following categories (NACE Ref. 1):

C - Mining and quarrying

D - Manufacturing

E - Electricity, gas and water supply

F - Construction

G - Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and personal & household goods

H - Hotels and restaurants

I - Transport, storage and communication

J - Financial intermediation

K - Real estate, renting and business activities

In addition, the agregates C – F (“Industry”) , G – K (“Services” ) and C – K (“Industry and Services”) are used.

Germany was not in a position to deliver labour costs for the activities I and K.

Labour costs are total labour costs and include direct renumeration, employers’ social contributions and all other labour costs.

Visualization of labour costs by using bar charts and boxplots

The labour costs here are visualized by using eiher bar charts or boxplots. A bar chart is a graphical tool of descriptive Statistics which represents each element xi of the data set by means of a bar of length xi (i = 1, 2, .. ,n). A boxplot aggregates the information contained in a given data set by displaying only five characteristics of the set. It is defined by a box of length x0.75 – x0.25 (interquartile range), the median x0.5 (marked inside the box) and the two extreme values xmin and xmax of the data set. The latter are connected with the box via two lines.