Market Indicators
The Korea Institute for Industrial Economics & Trade (KIET) said on Sept. 16 that the labor productivity per employee of the Korean manufacturing industry edged up by just 0.5 percent last year, and declined by 2.7 percent in the first half of this year after the heyday between 2000 and 2010.
The productivity per employee surpassed that of Japan in 2008, and reached 110 percent of that country's two years ago. The productivity per hour is about 96 percent of that of Japan as of now. When it comes to productivity per employee, Korea currently ranks third behind the United States and France among the top 10 manufacturing countries, and tenth in the OECD.
Korea is at the 17th place in the OECD as far as the productivity per hour is concerned. By industry, the electrical and electronics, metal product manufacturing, and textile sectors’ productivity levels are higher than those of Japanese counterparts unlike oil, coal, chemicals, and basic metals.
The KIET advised that Korea needs to stop its previous strategy of imitating advanced economies so that more profits can be taken from the same amount of labor by means of the development of high-value-added products, with labor productivity plateauing. It added that an increase in output based on long hours of labor should be avoided. At present, Korean workers’ average working hours exceeds the OECD average and that of Japan by 22 and 25 percent, respectively.