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by LeanderK
2460 days ago
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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). |
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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.