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Conveys the annual percentage change in real GDP per employed person.

This indicator measures labour productivity growth and provides information on the evolution, efficiency and quality of human capital in the production process. A country’s economic growth may be the result of either increased employment or more effective work by those who are employed. The annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person highlights ‘more effective work by those who are employed’ as a key measure of economic performance. Labour productivity (and growth) estimates can be used to support the formulation of labour market policies and monitor their effects. They can also contribute to the understanding of how labour market performance affects living standards.

United Nations Statistics Division

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Statistical Institute of Belize (SIB)

Annual

Percentage

The annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person reflects labour productivity which is the growth rate of output per unit of labour input (persons employed). A positive rate signifies that there is increased efficiency in the use of labour without adding more of other inputs. It may also mean that that each worker now has more of the other inputs such as physical capital, human capital or intermediate inputs. A negative result means that labour efficiency has decreased.

Real GDP is GDP calculated at constant prices, that is, the volume level of GDP, removing the effect of inflation and instead favouring comparisons of quantities beyond price changes.

Employed persons are those persons of working age who during a short reference period such as a week, performed work for others in exchange for pay or profit.

No disaggregation is required for this indicator.

The computation method:

Real GDP per employed person= (GDP at constant prices)/(total employment);

The numerator and denominator of the equation above should refer to the same reference period, for example, the same calendar year. If we call the real GDP per employed person “LabProd”, then the annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person is calculated as follows:

Annual growth rate of Real GDP per employed person =((LabProd in year n)-(LabProd in year n-1))/((LabProd in year n-1))

A proxy to measure sustainable economic growth in relation to productive employment.

Output measures are obtained from national accounts and represent, as much as possible, GDP at market prices for the aggregate economy. However, despite common principles that are mostly based on the United Nations System of National Accounts, there are still significant problems in international consistency of national accounts estimates, based on factors such as differences in the treatment of output in services sectors, differences in methods used to correct output measures for price changes (in particular, the use of different weighting systems to obtain deflators) and differences in the degree of coverage of informal economic activities. Data on employment used in the denominator of this indicator refer, as much as possible, to the average number of persons with one or more paid jobs during the year. That is, the reliability of the employment data is also dependent on the degree of coverage of informal activities by the statistical source used.

More sophisticated measures, such as “total factor productivity”, which is the output per combined unit of all inputs, are not included. Estimated labour productivity may also show an increase if the mix of activities in the economy or in an industry has shifted from activities with low levels of productivity to activities with higher levels, even if none of the activities have become more productive. For a constant “mix” of activities the best measure of labour input to be used in the productivity equation would be “total number of annual hours actually worked by all persons employed”. In many cases, however, this labour input measure is difficult to obtain or estimate reliably.

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.