The French are lazy.
Germans are efficient.
And Brits and Americans are…
Well, the Brits and Americans just work.
Thanks to the FT’s Money Supply blog for pointing us in the direction of the UK’s Office for National Statistic’s international comparisons of productivity, where there’s plenty of data with which to make some new national (labour) stereotypes.
To start with, here’s GDP produced per worker and per hour worked in 2008. You can see that on both those measures the US beats the rest of the G7 world.
What’s very interesting, however, are the other two charts in the report — showing growth in GDP produced per worker and hour worked in recent years. On that basis, the UK was far outpacing the US and the rest of the G7 nations in terms of growing production since 1990. Click to enlarge.
But will the 2009 data show the same British industriousness?
Related link:
A gap in the output gap – FT Alphaville