Productivity, labour costs and poverty in the EU

European households' disposable income didn't keep up with the GDP growth, but continued to decline in real terms from one year to another, so that a growing part of the population says that it needs to spend from their savings or even take loans to pay their daily costs, shows the latest quarterly Bulletin of the EC, regarding the employment and social situation.

The population with low incomes, who face such difficulties, vary from less than 10% in Germany and Luxembourg to 40% in Italy, Romania, Slovakia and Spain.

According to the same bulletin, Romanian employees, working part-time in the third quarter of 2014, the latest period for which data was available for all EU countries, had the highest number of hours worked per week (average 27.5), followed by Sweden (24.3 hours) and Belgium (23.5 hours). However, for the hours worked by full-time employees, the European ranking is led by Greece (43.7 hours), followed by Poland (42.5 hours) and Cyprus (42.4 hours per week).

In the fourth quarter of 2014, where data is comparable with the labor cost criterion, the highest decreases in unit cost of labor were registered in the Czech Republic (-5%), followed by Romania (-4.4%) and Slovenia (-3.4 %).

In terms of labor productivity, the greatest advances have been recorded, in the same interval, in Romania (5.6%), Latvia (4%) and Slovenia (3.2%).