Some renewed interest in this perennial surprise fact, which apparently busts national stereotyping WIDE OPEN – the diligent Greeks work more (average 2109 hours/year) than the OECD average (1749 hours/year), second only to the South Koreans. And the idle Germans are among the lowest (1419 hours a year).
Amazing? Not really. These numbers clump together part-time and full-time workers, and Greece has proportionately more full-timers than part-timers (89.8%) compared with the OECD average (84.4%), which bumps up the number.
The thing is: a relatively small share of Greeks do paid work or look for it, particularly women, who are more likely to work part-time. Poking around the OECD database, it turns out that in 2007, before the crisis, 43.9% of the Greek population were in the labour force, against the G7 average of 50.3%. And they retire early: in 2007, 53.3% of Greeks aged 55-59 were employed, against the OECD average of 63.2%.
A better measure of labour supply is average hours per person of working age in the whole population. This chart is cribbed from an IMF report: data are from 2002, but the numbers underlying them haven’t changed much since then. Greece (GRC) is in the lower half. (BTW look at Germany almost at the bottom: Germany’s super-high labour productivity means they can work fewer hours and still be rich, the cunning fiends.)
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Chris Cook is the FT's education correspondent. After joining the FT in 2008 as a Peter Martin Fellow, he worked for two years as a leader writer.
Emily Cadman joined the FT in 2010 and is head of the interactive desk.
Martin Stabe works on the FT's interactive team, specialising in databases for interactive graphics.
Keith Fray heads the editorial statistics team, providing data for articles and graphics. His background is in economics, studying at Birkbeck College, London.
Sally Gainsbury works in the investigations team in London, specialising in public policy and data analysis.
