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132 Monthly Lab. Rev. 3 (2009)
International Comparisons of Hours Worked: An Assessment of the Statistics

handle is hein.journals/month132 and id is 470 raw text is: International comparisons of hours worked: an assessment of the statistics A study of 13 countries reveals that measures of hours worked based on administrative sources are relatively low while measures based on establishment and labor force surveys are relatively high; thus, although ever improving, these measures cannot yet be taken at face value and are useful onlyjbr broad comparisons ublic commentators, the press, and governments are interested in the hours people work. Work hours un- derpin productivityr measures. The number of hours individuals work stimulates debate on the quality of life in an international context: do some societies live to work while others work to live? The differences in hours worked between countries fuels dis- cussion of economic growth, employment, and unemployment. Any comparative meas- ure between countries, however, depends on a standardization of concepts, sources, and methods. Measuring and comparing how many hours people spend at work across countries is not an exact science, despite recent improvements in methodology and data coverage. The recommendation from the Inter- national Labor Organization (ILO) is to use actual hours worked, including annual hours actually worked, as the basis for in- ternational comparisons. The recommen- dation to include annual hours actually worked was part of an updated ILO resolu- tion regarding the measurement of working time that was adopted at the International Conference of Labor Statisticians held in the fall of 2008. Background research on working time and hours worked carried out by international statistical organizations and national statistical agencies to prepare for the conterence has contributed to a rich debate on hours worked. This article benefits from the recent exchange of ideas leading up to the 2008 Conference and looks at two data sets on hours worked. The better known of the two is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data set on average annual hours ac- tually worked, for all employed persons, for 30 countries, published in the annual OECD Em- ployment Outlook.' The second data set is the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) underlying hours and employment data in the annual re- port, Gross Domestic Product per Employed Person, which presents an international com- parison of gross domestic product (GDP) per hour worked for 13 countries. The OECD data set provides an explicit measure of average an- nual hours worked, while the BLS data set pub- lishes total employment and hours, from which a series for average annual hours worked can be derived. Both hours-worked data series comple- ment output and productivity data published by the respective organizations. Whereas data users tend to look at the number of average hours worked per year when making comparisons between countries, both BLS and OECD caution that such com- parisons are prone to error and that the data series best describe changes over time. This Monthly Labor Review - May 2009 3 Susan E. Fleck Susan E. Fleck is Chief, Divi- sion of Major Sector Produc- tivity, Office of Productivity and Technology, Bureau of Labor Statistics. This article was prepared when she was a supervisor in the Division of International Labor Com- parisons. E-mail: fleck.susan@ bls.gov

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