ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the different ways in which the incomes from employment of workers are measured in official statistics and looks at recent international trends in these data. Wage rates give a good indication of the minimum cash entitlements of adult workers, as stated in collective agreements. They are particularly relevant for industries where labour is not well organized and unions are weak, or for smaller countries where national agreements have a big impact on incomes. For each country, except France, the data are derived from collective agreements and so tend to omit the smallest firms and those sectors where labour is not well organized. The index is a weighted average of wage rates for different groups of workers, with the weights usually reflecting the total number of employees covered. As the values in 1970 all differ it is not immediately clear where the largest changes have occurred and it helps if the annual percentage rate of growth is calculated.
