More productive economies allow their citizens to work shorter hours

• The key driver of rising incomes and decreasing working hours is productivity growth. To understand working hours the key metric is labour productivity: the economic return (ie. money earned) for one hour of work.
• At the most concrete level, labour productivity represents things like the number of breads that a baker bakes in an hour, or the number of cars factory workers assemble in an hour.
• Higher labour productivity is associated with fewer working hours, as shown in the chart here with labour productivity on the horizontal axis and annual working hours on the vertical axis.
• However this doesn't necessarily mean that workers in more productive economies work shorter hours, as shown by Singapore and USA which both have very high productivity but work many more hours than their counterparts with similar productivity.
• The vertical axis shows the average hours worked per year by a resident of the country per year. The horizontal axis shows the average productivity (International$ earned per hour)
• Try hovering over some countries and you should see the total annual hours worked, along with their average productivity ($ earned per hour):