The long vacations (often a whistle word for "laziness") is a common refrain, but as far as I know the numbers don't bear that out: the vacation days are not very different, and the working hours are actually longer.
That's correct. People proclaiming that it's about quality of life are mistaken, other nations have overwhelmingly demonstrated that you can have both in abundance.
Portugal works more hours (1,842) than the US does (1,783; average labor hours per worker per year). Yet US output per capita is nearly three times higher. Greece works far more hours than the US. The US is near the OECD average for hours worked, Greece is 15% higher than the OECD average. Spain works 4% fewer hours than the US, with 1/2 the output. Italy works 3% fewer hours with close to 1/2 the output.
Forget about the US though, it's nowhere near the best example of this in action.
Germany is at $48k GDP per capita, over double that of Portugal or Greece, while working 1363 hours per year. About 20% fewer hours than Spain and Italy. That's nearly 500 fewer hours of annual work versus Portugal. The Germans are averaging 26 hours per week across a year, Greek workers are at 39 (which in real terms means once you remove vacation time, the average worker in Greece is pulling well over 40 hours per work week).
The Greeks are among the worst off in hours worked, at 2035 hours. 672 more hours than the Germans. That's a strong indictment of the quality of life argument usually tossed about regarding countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.
Some of the countries near the bottom in hours worked in the OECD: Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Australia, UK.
They're all simultaneously very high output countries, working fewer hours than Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece.
Norway and Switzerland are near the bottom in hours as well, however their context are rather unique.
In case anyone is interested, here's how the figures break out on an hourly basis, for output per capita and hours worked. The OECD average on hours worked per year is 1,763.
Country | Hours (year) | GDP Per Capita | Output Per Hour
--- Best results (low hours, high output) ---
Denmark | 1,410 | $60.7k | $43.05
Netherlands | 1,430 | $53.1k | $37.13
Germany | 1,363 | $48.3k | $35.44
--- Mid or mid-upper tier outcomes ---
Ireland | 1,879 | $76.1k | $40.50
United States | 1,783 | $62.6k | $35.11
Australia | 1,669 | $56.4k | $33.79
Sweden | 1,621 | $53.9k | $33.25
Austria | 1,601 | $51.5k | $32.17
Finland | 1,653 | $49.8k | $30.13
Belgium | 1,550 | $46.7k | $30.13
France | 1,472 | $42.9k | $29.14
Canada | 1,703 | $46.3k | $27.19
--- Underperforming (too many hours vs output) ---
Wow! this is an really interesting chart. I would not have expected the US to have the same Output Per Hour as germany. Switzerland is just killing it. Where's your source? The distribution of Output Per Hour per country would be even more interesting. I would expect countries like Italy to fairly multi-modal (north/south divide).
I threw it together. The source is the OECD hours worked data (public information), with IMF 2018 GDP figures (which are pretty similar to other major sources like the World Bank).
This isn't a perfect system, as it doesn't account for the variance in % of the population that is working. However, since the workers ultimately represent all or nearly all of the GDP output regardless, it's quite effective overall as a reference. Basically you just need to get to the broad view: how many hours are the people of a nation working and what kind of output does the nation have. You still get a lot of things in a given nation that impact GDP that isn't going to represent perfectly when just looking at labor.
A potentially even better approach would be to take how many workers a nation has, with the hours worked and the national GDP. So you look at GDP per worker, rather than GDP per capita, and then look at the average hours worked. The big question though is the accuracy of national worker count figures, and how that compares to the accuracy on GDP figures. Flip a coin perhaps.
However, this data does tell you some clear things. It tells you that Mexico is suffering pretty hard under those hours worked vs output (and as a share of output, it tells you what their compensation limits are). The Polish are working far too many hours, although it is producing a decent output figure. The people of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands are generating incredible economic output with those very low hours figures.
It also tells you that while eg the French often get flack for supposedly being lazy when it comes to working hours, they have one of the best hourly output figures of any nation and match that up very well with low working hours (they have one of the better combinations of hours & output, well exceeding the UK).
However it obviously doesn't tell you what effect lowering or increasing hours worked would have exactly on a given nation. For example, can Germany push its export machine a lot further by increasing the hours worked to US levels (are there buyers for those additional exports), or is that already heavily optimized and so they're doing the logical thing and reducing hours while trying to maintain max exports & output generally. Nearly all of the OECD have been persistently reducing hours worked the past decade plus, while largely maintaining or increasing output. A nice combination when you can manage it.
Switzerland, Norway, Ireland and Iceland are freak outliers for the most part. Switzerland is a banking empire, with rather dramatic banking related output concentration as a share of their GDP; no doubt they're killing it though. Ireland's GDP moderately misrepresents what their individual income levels are, as their GDP figure is quite inflated by corporations that have moved there for tax purposes; Ireland's workers have done very well overall, just not quite as well as their incredibly high GDP figure implies. Norway's numbers as everyone understands are skewed by their exceptional oil output per capita. And Iceland only has 338,000 people (it's kind of like including Luxembourg), interesting to note non the less.
there should more granular data, at least in europe. Producing a map with GDP per working hour per worker on a district level would be quite cool (whatever the most precise avaiable statistic is)! I don't think just listing countries ist actually that interesting, because i would suspect some countries to be quite heterogenous and other quite homogenous.
When I think about it, GDP per working hour is actually quite the interesting metric.
These are not like for like, because they ignore the relative value of different market segments and of comparative advantage.
Germany produces high-value consumer and industrial engineering products, and financial services. Greece produces tourism and olive oil. Should Greece somehow be forced to produce lifts, yachts, and high-status cars, or is that actually an unworkable - not to mention unhelpful - idea?
This is a major flaw with the current set-up of the EU. Euro adoption has made it very hard for countries to balance imports and exports. Germany has a huge current account surplus, while Southern Europe has an equivalent deficit.
These are structural issues and nothing to do with working hours or even with bad management.
A completely homogenised EU - or international - economy would be a monster. There's no reason why countries should compete directly on GDP when they have such different products and services to offer. But there's nothing in current GDP accounting that supports diverse economic activity without attempting to penalise it.
The ideal would be wealth redistribution between countries. The EU does some of that, but in a slightly random way that seems to lack a coherent EU-wide long-term development strategy.
Edit: it would be interesting to break out the US figures on a state by state basis. I suspect we'd see some very large disparities between the most and least productive states.
Portugal works more hours (1,842) than the US does (1,783; average labor hours per worker per year). Yet US output per capita is nearly three times higher. Greece works far more hours than the US. The US is near the OECD average for hours worked, Greece is 15% higher than the OECD average. Spain works 4% fewer hours than the US, with 1/2 the output. Italy works 3% fewer hours with close to 1/2 the output.
Forget about the US though, it's nowhere near the best example of this in action.
Germany is at $48k GDP per capita, over double that of Portugal or Greece, while working 1363 hours per year. About 20% fewer hours than Spain and Italy. That's nearly 500 fewer hours of annual work versus Portugal. The Germans are averaging 26 hours per week across a year, Greek workers are at 39 (which in real terms means once you remove vacation time, the average worker in Greece is pulling well over 40 hours per work week).
The Greeks are among the worst off in hours worked, at 2035 hours. 672 more hours than the Germans. That's a strong indictment of the quality of life argument usually tossed about regarding countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.
Some of the countries near the bottom in hours worked in the OECD: Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Austria, Sweden, Finland, Australia, UK.
They're all simultaneously very high output countries, working fewer hours than Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece.
Norway and Switzerland are near the bottom in hours as well, however their context are rather unique.