Global Working Hours

Drawing on about 5,000 labor force and household surveys from 160 countries that cover 97% of the world’s population, this paper builds a new global database of hours worked and shows that hours worked per adult decline only slightly with GDP per capita and are weakly correlated with economic development overall: the unconditional elasticity of hours with respect to GDP is about -0.04 across countries and -0.01 within countries over time, GDP explains roughly 5% of cross-country and under 1% of within-country historical variation in hours, and the implied reduction is 0-20% over the entire development spectrum. The strong age and gender gradients the authors document are, in their cross-country regressions, driven less by development itself than by institutions: hours worked by the young (aged 15-19) and the elderly (aged 60+) fall with development almost entirely because of rising school attendance and public pension coverage, while prime-age (20-59) hours stay roughly flat but undergo what the authors call a “great gender reshuffling,” in which falling male hours per worker are quantitatively offset by rising female labor force participation. Across countries and over time, labor taxes are strongly negatively correlated with prime-age hours worked; controlling for government transfers only partly reduces this link, which the authors read as ruling out income and substitution effects on labor supply as the only driver, while controlling for working-hours regulations and the size of the formal sector reduces the link much more sharply, suggesting to them that regulation—not just the incentive effects of taxes—plays a large role in shortening intensive-margin hours in richer countries. The authors conclude that collective choices and social norms, often encoded in public policy (schooling, pensions, cultural norms about women’s work, and hours regulation), powerfully shape working hours over and above pure economic development. These are correlational cross-country and time-series patterns rather than identified causal effects, and hours are measured as weekly hours in all GDP-producing jobs (including unpaid agricultural work but excluding unpaid home services).

Emmanuel Saez | Macro Paper Warehouse

Global Working Hours