In a recent post, we looked at US-India trade. Today we look at the amount of labor in India that provides their goods and services. In short, India’s workers put in more hours than workers in almost* any other country.

It’s common to use the unemployment rate or the employment-to-population ratio to measure an economy’s performance. A less-familiar metric is how many hours workers are actually working. Our FRED map above shows the average annual hours worked by “persons engaged.” That is, the total number of hours worked per year divided by the average number of persons employed, both full-time and part-time, in the formal and informal sectors of the economy, accounting for holidays, sick leave, and overtime. The time frame is 2019, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

This metric represents the labor input of a country, where a higher value implies more input. It’s a good measure to use to compare labor inputs across countries. And our map tells a simple but potentially overlooked story: India is among the hardest-working economies in the world. Workers in India spent more than 2,600 hours per year on the job. 

Most of the advanced economies have much lower inputs and fall into the lighter shades on the map. In most parts of Europe, for example, the typical work year is closer to 1,600 hours. In the United States, which has a relatively high number of work hours for an advanced economy, the average worker puts in fewer than 1800 hours. And India is an outlier even among the countries of South and Southeast Asia.

*We can’t say India works the most hours of any country because FRED doesn’t have labor input data for some countries (shaded in gray in the map).

A sample of countries and their hours worked in 2019

1st India  2605.39

2nd Bangladesh  2417.72

3rd Pakistan  2390.25

…

15th Vietnam  2067.56

16th Russian Federation  2062.40                

17th Taiwan  2052.85

…

28th Romania  1803.11

29th United States  1796.65

30th Poland  1796.51

…

64th Norway  1418.55

65th Denmark  1372.39

66th Germany  1372.04

How this map was created: Search FRED for and select “Average Annual Hours Worked by Persons Engaged for India.” Next, click “View Map,” set the date to 2019-01-01, and click “Edit Map.” Under “Format,” make sure the “Number of color groups” is 5. Under “Data grouped by,” select “User Defined Method.” Set the intervals as follows: 1600, 1900, 2200, 2500, and 2800. Finally, click “Apply intervals.”

Suggested by Kritika Chakrabarti, B. Ravikumar, and Debargha Som.