Employment developments in OECD countries

A rise in the number of gainfully employed and the labour volume in a country do not reveal whether an improvement of the employment situation has also occurred because the population development must also be considered. Therefore, the labour volume must be correlated with the working-age population and with the (potential) number of working hours that the population could achieve at a full workforce implementation. This means that the "utilisation rate" of the factor labour must be calculated. As a rule it is assumed that per annum 2,080 hours are worked. The calculations show that as a result of the rise of the working-age population, the labour volume per person only changes slightly. However, the development is very different from country to country. A clear increase in the utilisation rate in the Netherlands and in the United States and a small rise in Spain stand in contrast to a decline in all other examined countries. This drop is considerable in Japan, France and western Germany.