Hours worked vs Productivity

Much of the stuff written about Greece over the last months has accused the Greek people of all kinds of things - living beyond their means, failure to pay taxes, and laziness among others. Recent OECD data, used by Tim Harford in More or Less on Radio 4 (link to the podcast here), suggests that Greeks are not lazy - they actually work longer hours per person than any other European country. However, analysis of the figures a little more depth, which GDP per worker, when it is used as a measure of productivity, putting Greece almost at the bottom of the table. The data (more detail in the article here) does come with a health warning, as unlike figures such as CPI or LFS unemployment it is not collected according to agreed international methods but by individual national statistics authorities. However, it could be useful for students to analyse likely reasons for the difference in number of hours worked and productivity between countries such as Germany and Greece.

The UK comes a rather mediocre 14th in both tables, by the way.