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http://guerby.org/blog/index.php/2007/02/27/151-heures-travaillees
Total hours worked in France and UK are similar (within 1%) and the country have similar population and age structure.
But in the UK unemployment is 4.7% vs 9.5% in France, a good factor of two.
So much for unemployment measuring anything useful.
The annual hours worked indicator is one of the most widely cited indicators provided by the OECD. The Factbook's comparability note says that "The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time and not yet suitable for inter-country comparisons." This warning is usually ignored. In its original form in the data annex to the annual OECD Employment Outlook, this table includes a warning about comparing levels as well as a great deal of country-by-country notes that assist the data user in assessing comparability among different countries. For example, data for the Netherlands exclude overtime hours--helping to explain the relatively low annual hours for this country. These notes could be attached to the tables in the Internet version of this table. An alternative to the chart for this indicator that is more consistent with the comparability note in the Factbook would be to chart the change in hours worked from 1990 to 2003 for each country rather than the 2003 level for each country."
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS OF LABOUR PRODUCTIVITY LEVELS (pdf).
If they take officially paid hours it can change the picture.
Also GDP is price-based, whereas some productivity numbers you see might be based on physical output (in the manufacturing sector for example).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_productivity
No economist will admit that total hours really worked is similar in France and in the UK to start with: that's contrary to orthodox economics since UK is liberal with a flexible labour market and France is full of rigidity and must be reformed, so the only way to make number match is to say that french worker are more productive per hour.
And I'm pretty sure 99.999% of economists haven't the slightest idea on how the productivity numbers they cite all day long are really compute and what they really mean.
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