The Real Value of Work by Country: GDP per Hour, Labor Share and Health Adjustments for 35 High-Income OECD Economies, 2024

This preprint extends our pay-per-hour comparison of 35 high-income OECD economies, 2024 (10.5281/zenodo.23635922), in three ways.

(1) GDP per hour worked, PPP-adjusted, in constant 2020 prices, using OECD employment-hours data. Ranks are shown next to GDP per capita and per worker.

(2) Labor share of output, shown as total compensation and as wages only, with an imputed self-employment adjustment labelled as an assumption. Ireland, Luxembourg and Norway, whose output is distorted by profit shifting and oil, are flagged and ranks are shown with and without them.

(3) Three separate health adjustments: enterprise-financed health spending as a lower-bound proxy for employer premiums (inside compensation, not added to it); health expenditure as a share of GDP (a GDP-per-hour column that removes the health and social work sector's output but not its hours is shown for reference only, as it is close to mechanical); and out-of-pocket spending as a share of net pay (a mixed-basis proxy).

A 2023 cross-check uses Penn World Table 11.0 and is not mixed with the 2024 figures. OECD's dataflow metadata describes its hours series as unsuitable for comparing levels of average annual hours across countries in a given year, so such comparisons are treated as rough.

The analysis was carried out by a team of AI agents built on Claude under the supervision of the human author. It has not been peer reviewed.