Tuesday, July 14, 2015

WHO WORKS THE MOST AND LEAST?

If you work 40hrs/wk for 52 weeks, you will have worked 2080 hrs for the year.  So who works the longest and who works the least in 38 major countries (China not included)?*

Who works the longest? Turns out it is Mexico (2,237 hrs/yr), South Korea (2,i63 hrs/yr), and, surprise, Greece (2.060hrs/yr).  A problem with Greece is that only about 52% of the labor force works.  In contrast 60.5% of the Mexican labor force works and 61.5% (rank 21 out of 38 major countries) of the South Koreans (rank 7).

Then who works the least?  Surprise.  In 38th and last place is Germany at 1,362 hrs/yr, followed by Norway at 1,408 hrs/yr and Netherlands at 1,421 hrs/yr. Germany has about 60.3% of the work force occupied (20th place), Norway at 71.2%(!) (3rd place), and Netherlands at 65.2%  (10th place).  Who beats Norway for work force participation - Sweden at 71.5% (1,607 hrs/yr), and at Number 1 Iceland at 81.4% (1,846 hrs/yr).

The hottest economies were Latvia, Chile and Turkey, all at 4.2% increase in GDP during 2013.  Not surprisingly, Greece had the worst economic performance with a 3.9% decline in GDP, followed by Italy at -1.7% and Portugal at -1.6% (because it is mentioned so much,Spain declined by 1.2%).

Well, where was the U.S. in this?  We ranked 16th in hours-worked/year (1,788 hrs/yr), 9th in GDP gain at 2.2%, and 13th in work force participation (63.2%).

* http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/07/10/are-americans-working-less-than-the-rest-of-the-world/?mod=djemRTE_h

No comments:

Post a Comment