Main aggregates, national accounts, (Eurostat ESA2010 TP, table 1) - MNA

Gross domestic product (GDP) and its components – value added by economic activity, expenditure and income statistics – are part of the ESA 2010 annual and quarterly national accounts produced by the European Commission (Eurostat) and national statistical authorities. Euro area results are estimated using information for the individual countries.

GDP is the value of an economy’s total output of goods and services minus intermediate consumption, plus net taxes on products and imports. GDP can also be broken down by expenditure or income components. The main expenditure aggregates that make up GDP are household final consumption, government final consumption, gross fixed capital formation, changes in inventories, and imports and exports of goods and services (including intra-euro area trade) while the income components include gross operating surplus and mixed income, compensation of employees, taxes on production and imports, and subsidies.

The GDP deflators and unit labour costs and its components (compensation per employee and labour productivity) are calculated by the ECB based on the ESA 2010 national accounts data.

The GDP deflators are the ratios of the series in current prices and volume series, where the current price series for the countries are adjusted for national exchange rate movements before joining the euro area.

Unit labour costs are a measure of total labour costs per unit of output calculated as the ratio of compensation per employee to labour productivity (defined as GDP per person employed).

Labour productivity reflects the output that can be produced with a given input of labour. It can be measured in several ways, but it is commonly measured as GDP divided by either total employment (by people in employment, i.e. including both employees and self-employed) or total hours worked. The headline ECB measure calculates labour productivity as GDP divided by persons in employment.

Compensation per employee is the total remuneration, in cash or in kind, that is payable by employers to employees in return for work, i.e. gross wages and salaries, as well as bonuses, overtime payments and employers’ social security contributions, divided by the total number of employees.

For more information, please refer to the ESA2010 manual and  ESA2010 Transmission programme (Table 1).