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Are Europeans Lazy? or Americans Crazy?

Are Europeans Lazy? or Americans Crazy?. Tito Boeri Bocconi University and Fondazione Debenedetti Portovenere 27 May 2006. Europeans have lower incomes per capita because they work less. Hourly Labour Productivity. Income per capita=hourly labour productivity*work hours per head.

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Are Europeans Lazy? or Americans Crazy?

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  1. Are Europeans Lazy? or Americans Crazy? Tito Boeri Bocconi University and Fondazione Debenedetti Portovenere 27 May 2006

  2. Europeans have lower incomes per capita because they work less Hourly Labour Productivity Income per capita=hourly labour productivity*work hours per head Source: Groningen Growth & Development Centre, Total Economy Database

  3. Why less hours per head? • Less people at work (the Lisbon target) • 2. Less hours per worker Deviations from the US Source: OECD

  4. Two explanations • Blanchard (2004) It is a matter of tastes, preferences. Europeans enjoy more leisure time than Americans, who are workholic and prefer consumption to leisure. Reassuring. • Prescott (2004) and Alesina et al. (2005) It is a matter of institutions.Taxes on labour, unions and product-labour market regulationsdiscouraging labour supply.

  5. Are US-Europe asymmetries related to individual decisions about hours of work? 45 40 35 30 25 Average weekly hours worked per Average weekly hours worked per self- employee employed USA ITALY EU 15 Source: Eurostat, European LFS ; Groningen Growth & Development Centre, Total Economy Database.

  6. Or perhaps collective bargaining? We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; Were sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. Were summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill: Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.

  7. What drives decisions about working time? • Report # 1. Social norms coordinate decisions between genders within and between families in the allocation of time between market, non-market work and joint leisure activities. • Report # 2. Institutions coordinate decisions between those working and those non-working. Work-sharing arrangements.

  8. Two different approaches • Paper 1 draws on Time-Use Data. Market and non-market activities. Close look at secondary activities and home production. Gender differences. • Paper 2 draws on Policy Experiments with Working Hours Reductions. So many different approaches and motivations. More or less centralised approaches.

  9. Underlying question for the final panel. Should the state regulate working time and how? • Increasing heterogeneity of preferences on working time. Longer working life, increasingly complex life course. Conflicts of interests in the allocation of time. • Are all interest being duly represented by private co-ordination mechanisms, e.g., unions and social norms? Are women, the unemployed and the children sufficiently represented? • Are there other reasons to regulate working time?

  10. First, getting the facts right. What is work and who is lazy? Source: Freeman and Schettkat, Economic policy, 2005

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