The ECB wage tracker is the result of a Eurosystem partnership currently comprising the European Central Bank and seven euro area National Central Banks: Deutsche Bundesbank, Bank of Greece, Banco de España, Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, De Nederlandsche Bank, and Osterreichische Nationalbank. It is based on a highly granular database of active collective bargaining agreements for Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Austria.
Netherlands, and Austria. The wage tracker should be considered as only one of many possible sources that can help to assess wage pressures in the euro area. These are not wage growth forecasts, as they only indicate wage pressures that mechanically arise from the collective bargaining agreements already in place. The Eurosystem and ECB staff macroeconomic projections remain the most comprehensive assessment of the wage outlook for the euro area.
The aggregate wage tracker information published here contains three different indicators of negotiated wage growth and an indicator of employee coverage in the underlying data.
The headline ECB wage tracker is a tracker of negotiated wage growth that includes collectively agreed one-off payments, such as those related to inflation compensation, bonuses or back-dated pay, which are smoothed over 12 months.
The ECB wage tracker excluding one-off payments reflects the extent of structural (or permanent) negotiated wage increases.
The ECB wage tracker with unsmoothed one-off payments is constructed using a methodology that, both in terms of data sources and statistical methodology, is conceptually similar to, but not necessarily the same as, the one used for the ECB indicator of negotiated wage growth.
The share of employees covered is the percentage of employees across the participating countries that are directly covered by ECB wage tracker data. This indicator provides information on the representativeness of the underlying (negotiated) wage growth signals obtained from the set of wage tracker indicators for the aggregate of the participating countries.
The ECB wage tracker may be subject to revision, and the forward-looking part should not be interpreted as a forecast as it only captures information in a more limited share of active collective bargaining agreements. As new agreements are made throughout the year, the growth rates indicated by the wage tracker are subject to change.
The coverage indicator provides an indication of the average representativeness of the wage signals stemming from the wage tracker at the euro area level proxied by the aggregate of the participating countries and within each country over time.
Monthly.
Data are collected on an ongoing basis.
For information about the naming convention (series key dimensions and metadata), refer to the EWT underlying DSD (ECB_EWT1) maintained by the ECB.
A collective bargaining agreement is considered to be active in the wage tracker data from (1) the first date between the signing date of the agreement, the starting date of the agreement, and the date of the first wage increase in the agreement, until (2) the last date between the end date of the agreement and the date of the last non-missing wage increase plus 12 months with zero wage growth, to consider all possible base effects from the wage increases that are recorded in the active agreements.
There are two country-specific exceptions. In Italy, in addition to the previous rule, collective bargaining agreements are always set to be active at least until the last date between the expiration date of the agreement and the current cut-off date. This is because wage negotiations might take a relatively long time in Italy and are usually established for a long period of time; furthermore, expired agreements are still valid until a new agreement is reached. For France, in addition to the rule above, and because contracts need to be re-negotiated every year, but do not need to reach an agreement, the wage tracker extends with a zero wage growth during 12 months all contracts that have expired in the current year until the cut-off date for data. Because the underlying data for France is compiled at the quarterly level, as in the indicator of negotiated wages, this cut-off-date is set at the end of the relevant quarter. This approach could imply the forward-looking wage tracker methodology provides a lower bound for negotiated wage growth in France in some months, which would then be revised upwards in future updates of the data.
The wage tracker methodology uses a double aggregation approach. First, it aggregates the highly granular information on collective bargaining agreements and constructs the wage tracker indicators at the country-level using information on the employee coverage for each country. Second, it uses this information to construct the aggregate for the euro area using time-varying weights based on the total compensation of employees among the participating countries.
Given the forward-looking nature of the tracker that is dependent on the underlying collective bargaining agreements database, the wage signals should always be considered as conditional on the information available at any given point in time and are thus subject to revisions.
Revisions will be incorporated and released as part of the regular dissemination of wage tracker information.
ECB Wage Tracker
Forward measure of active contracts – should not be interpreted as a forecast
ECB calculations based on data provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank, Bank of Greece, Banco de España, Banque de France, Banca d’Italia, Oesterreichische Nationalbank, the Dutch employers’ association AWVN and Eurostat.
The main aggregate results are published in the ECB’s Data Portal eight times per year, always on Wednesday in the week that follows each Governing Council monetary policy meeting and the associated press conference.
Download the series catalogue containing a full list of series and associated metadata of the dataset EWT in CSV format (zipped)