Unit Labour Costs & Wages API
Unit labour costs, wages and productivity — the labour-cost side of inflation and competitiveness, on one comparable screen, from the OECD's official productivity statistics as an API, live, no key. Wages, productivity and unit labour costs are bound by a simple identity: unit labour cost growth is roughly wage growth minus productivity growth. When pay rises faster than output per worker, the extra cost has to go somewhere — into prices or into margins — which is why unit labour costs are one of the indicators central banks watch most closely for home-grown (second-round) inflation, and why a country whose unit labour costs run ahead of its trading partners loses competitiveness. The OECD harmonises and seasonally adjusts the figures so they are comparable across economies. This API serves the year-on-year growth of all three: unit labour costs, labour compensation per employee (the clean per-worker wage measure) and labour productivity (GDP per person employed). The board endpoint ranks every economy by unit-labour-cost growth — where labour-cost pressure is building fastest — with wages and productivity alongside. The wages endpoint ranks by wage growth, the gauge of pay pressure. The country endpoint gives one economy's three figures with the wage-minus-productivity decomposition of its unit labour costs. Each reading carries its own quarter and discontinued series are excluded, so the board is genuinely current. The labour-cost / wage-inflation cut — distinct from the realised-inflation feeds, the employment and unemployment boards (counts and rates, not costs), and the generic multi-provider data aggregator. Figures are quarterly year-on-year, in percent.
api.oanor.com/labourcosts-api
