Working Hours and Productivity in EU
If you had read the relevant post in Guardian, entitled “Who works the longest hours in Europe?“, you should have noted that in EU there are not big differences between the countries on the working hours per week for a full time employer. The problem is with the productivity of the employers in each country. More specifically, the max difference between the working hours per week in EU is 10%, while between the productivity per hour the max difference is 78%. Also if we examine the standard deviations we will see that
| Standard Deviation for: | |
| Working Hours per Week | 1.06 |
| Productivity per Hour | 34.70 |
| Productivity per Week | 1412.19 |
| Productivity per Year | 73434.03 |
For someone who knows the basics in Mathematics, it is clear that inside the EU, there is a huge problem of heterogeneity.
In the following plots you can see:
- Who does work the most Hours per Week in EU
- Who does Produce more per Hour in EU
and - Who does Produce more per Week in EU
In more details:
| Country | Working Hours per Week | Productivity per Hour | Productivity per Week | Productivity per Year |
| Italy | 40.5 | 101.5 | 4110.8 | 213759.0 |
| Czech Republic | 42.3 | 70.1 | 2965.2 | 154192.0 |
| Lithuania | 39.7 | 55.7 | 2211.3 | 114987.1 |
| Luxembourg | 40.5 | 189.2 | 7662.6 | 398455.2 |
| France | 41.1 | 132.7 | 5454.0 | 283606.4 |
| Slovakia | 41.5 | 78.4 | 3253.6 | 169187.2 |
| Ireland | 39.7 | 125.6 | 4986.3 | 259288.6 |
| Slovenia | 41.8 | 80.2 | 3352.4 | 174322.7 |
| Germany | 42.0 | 123.7 | 5195.4 | 270160.8 |
| Belgium | 41.7 | 134.7 | 5617.0 | 292083.5 |
| Spain | 41.6 | 107.9 | 4488.6 | 233409.3 |
| Netherlands | 40.9 | 136.5 | 5582.8 | 290308.2 |
| Denmark | 39.1 | 119.2 | 4660.7 | 242357.4 |
| Poland | 42.2 | 53.9 | 2274.6 | 118278.2 |
| Finland | 40.3 | 111.3 | 4485.4 | 233240.3 |
| Sweden | 40.9 | 115.5 | 4723.9 | 245645.4 |
| Latvia | 40.8 | 47.1 | 1921.7 | 99927.4 |
| Malta | 41.4 | 81.9 | 3390.7 | 176314.3 |
| EU | 41.6 | 100.0 | 4160.0 | 216320.0 |
| Bulgaria | 41.3 | 41.7 | 1722.2 | 89554.9 |
| Romania | 41.0 | 41.7 | 1709.7 | 88904.4 |
| Portugal | 42.3 | 65.4 | 2766.4 | 143853.8 |
| Estonia | 40.8 | 61.1 | 2492.9 | 129629.8 |
| Austria | 43.7 | 115.0 | 5025.5 | 261326.0 |
| UK | 42.7 | 107.2 | 4577.4 | 238026.9 |
| Greece | 43.7 | 76.3 | 3334.3 | 173384.1 |
| Hungary | 40.6 | 59.2 | 2403.5 | 124983.0 |
| Cyprus | 42.1 | 80.0 | 3368.0 | 175136.0 |
Nevertheless from the above we can’t conclude to the result that some of the EU members are lazy. This is because each country doesn’t produce the same things, they are not equally rich in order to buy the same productive tools and they don’t have the same bureaucracy or structural problems.
I hope that in the near future these differences will be ironed out. It is certain that we will never be absolute homogeneous, but if we want to make the European and Economic Union to work, we must start breaking some barriers.
Notes:
* The source for this post was this article from Guardian, which had taken the statistics from the Office for National Statistics.
* The idea for this post came from those tweets: http://goo.gl/LS9lm, http://goo.gl/a2wti, http://goo.gl/S2ilO, http://goo.gl/X0hlC
.* The plots were made with the use of Python and the Matplotlib module.
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