Activity: GDP per head v GDP per employee in Australia

Activity: GDP per head v GDP per employee in Australia previous

Follow steps 1-8 to produce 'GDP per capita' and 'GDP per employee' results for Australia.

Go to 'ILO KILM' database
Find 'labour productivity for total economy' series for Australia. It will look as below:
Labour productivity for total economy - Australia
Click 'data' and choose 'GDP per person employed' to give:
GDP per person employed - Australia
(Note the source and metadata box obtained by sweeping over a numbered data cell)
Click the chart icon and if necessary change dimensions to get following chart:
GDP per person employed chart - Australia
Go back to series item list and click 'Macroeconomic, social and human development' series
Click 'GDP per capita' (i.e. per head of total population) for Australia to get the table below
GDP per capita - Australia
Click the chart icon to get the following graph:
GDP per capita graph - Australia
Now compare charts or tables and see if 'GDP per capita' and 'GDP per employee' have changed in the same direction each year i.e. try to find years in which 'GDP per capita' has gone up but 'GDP per employee' has gone down or vice versa.
If there are such examples they might occur because:
unemployment rate has changed;
demographic variables have changed;
participation rate (rate that people want to participate in the labour market) has changed.

Note that the two series have values that are very different. This is because they have different base year values: 1990, 2000.

You could produce, on a spreadsheet, indices of the two series based on a common value for a common initial year. You could then plot them on a chart. This would allow an easy visual comparison.

But you should be aware that the will be an element of incomparability as the PPP base years will be different.

(Note: GDP per employee is a PPP series although this is not stated in the series header)

The University of Manchester; Mimas; ESRC; RDI

Countries and Citizens: Unit 2 Making cross-national comparisons using macro data by Dave Fysh, University of Portsmouth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence.