This is slightly higher than the national average of 3.9 per cent. Even though the region has somewhat higher unemployment than the national average, the rise in unemployment in Northern Norway has been relatively low in the last year. Finnmark is one of the four counties in Norway to record the sharpest fall in unemployment over the past year. This snapshot report on the current situation in this part of the country and similar reports from the other regions provide information that is important to interest-rate setting. The labour market has improved. The number of persons employed in Norway began to increase in summer 2003 and unemployment stabilised. Employment in distributive trades has increased. There are also signs that employment is rising in service sectors such as education, the public sector and health and social services, from the weak levels recorded in the first six months of last year. Manufacturing employment remained well below the level one year earlier in the fourth quarter of 2003, but is falling at a slower pace. Unemployment has been fairly stable. Adjusted for seasonal variations, LFS unemployment stood at 4.4 per cent of the labour force in January. Growth in household demand, petroleum investment and increased activity in the business sector are paving the way for a rise in employment in the period ahead. On the other hand, intensified competition and continued rationalisation in the business sector may have a dampening impact on labour demand.
According to Table 1, mark-ups will have been adding, on average, over one percentage point each year to measured inflation rates across the G7 countries between 1980 and 2016, other things equal. As context, over the same period average G7 8  inflation rates have fallen by over 10 percentage points. A second potential macro-economic impact of higher mark-ups is on sales. Higher mark-ups will, other things equal, have pushed down on aggregate demand and generated a deadweight loss of consumer surplus (“Harberger triangle”). Baquee and Farhi (2018) estimate the size of this effect and find that eliminating mark-ups entirely would raise aggregate US total factor productivity (TFP) by as much as 35%. 9  To better understand some of the drivers of higher mark-ups, it is useful to look at more granular data. Using a similar approach to De Loecker and Eeckhout (2017, 2018), we draw on data for around 3,500 unique UKlisted companies from the late-1980s to construct around 33,500 firm-year mark-up estimates. 10  Using that  methodology, Chart 3 plots a sales-weighted measure of mean mark-ups for UK-listed companies since 1987. It shows a striking rise, from 1.2 to around 1.6, over the period. This broadly mirrors international trends.