The Best Path to Prosperity?

Between 1970 and 2000, GDP per person rose by 64% in the United States and by 60% in France. In America, this came about because productivity per worker rose by 38% and hours worked per worker rose by 26%.

In France, it came about because productivity rose by 83% while hours worked fell by 23%.

Source.

Which led me to think: isn’t GDP/hours-worked a better measure of “the good lifeâ€ than GDP/capita? You can have stunning GDP/capita if everyone works all the time. (Hey: what country does that make me think of?)

Which led me to dig up the excellent OECD data sets on labor productivity here. (Not to worry, it’s not XLS or PDF, just spiffy HTML/CSS; Check ’em out–excellent interactive spreadsheets with pop-up menus and such.)

About which–if you get back here–you’ll be hearing a lot more.

For now, here are the 2006 numbers (dollars converted using purchasing power parity).

	$/worker hour	Relative to US (100)
Luxembourg	72	143
Norway	71	141
Belgium	53	104
Netherlands	51	102
Ireland	52	102
United States	50	100
France	50	99
Germany	47	93
Sweden	45	89
G7 countries	45	89
Euro-zone (excluding Denmark, Sweden and United Kingdom)	43	86
Denmark	43	85
NAFTA	42	84
Austria	42	84
Australia	42	83
United Kingdom	41	82
Finland	41	82
Canada	41	82
Switzerland	40	80
OECD-Europe (excluding Turkey)	40	79
EU19 (EU members that are also OECD members)	40	79
Spain	39	78
Italy	38	76
OECD	38	75
Japan	36	71
Iceland	36	71
New Zealand	28	56
Slovak Republic	25	50
Portugal	24	48
Hungary	24	47
Czech Republic	22	44
Korea	20	41
Poland	19	38
Mexico	16	32
Turkey	15	29

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