Funny.. in Europe, Germans are considered hard-working and Greeks typically "lazy". According to these stats, the truth is completely the opposite!
Consequently I believe there is greater focus on continuously doing the most important task during work rather than occupying oneself with 'busy work' that is prevalent in many other work cultures.
It seems they can't really win.
It would be logic, a richer country, a better life. Is that shameful or something?
I get it, stereotypes can suck and make bad null hypotheses but thats how these things go.
You can accept the data and change your theory or you can ignore the data and keep your theory.
The more simple theory here is, obviously, that the Greeks work more.
It bothers me that many people in a community of theoretically science orientated people, as HN, choose the more complicated explanation by default.
"thats how these things go" is a really low standard, by the way.
FTA:
>The concept used is the total number of hours worked over the year divided by the average number of people in employment.
(emphasis mine)
My understanding is that the stereotypes are about "Germans" and "Greeks", which implies total populations (presumably defined by residency or nationality or something similar), but that data uses, as a denominator, only that portion of the population which is employed.
The inclusion of the population at large, or, more importantly, the population that could be employed, is discussed elsewhere in the thread (outside of the notion of stereotypes) as being a more useful indication of something like labor output (at least as compared with potential total output), especially when compared with GDP.
Either of those are unique among a professional largely salaried.
Added to this, 90% of staff where I work have left by latest 14:00 Friday afternoon. This also seems pretty common in Austria generally.
Germany has a bigger proportion of part timers than Greece, which explains the numbers.