How Do the Hours Americans Work Compare to the Rest of the World?

From stlouisfed.org

The On the Economy blog will periodically rerun blog posts that were of particular interest. The following is a post from October on hours worked around the world. Macroeconomists have long been interested in understanding time series trends in aggregate hours worked. Long-term trend changes in per capita hours worked across countries are, in fact, large. The figure below shows yearly hours worked per capita aggregated to Europe,1 the U.S. and the rest of the world (ROW). The figure shows a precipitous drop in per capita hours worked of about 30 percent from 1950 to 2007 for Europe. However, they steadily rose in the ... (full story)