So have Germans become complacent? Could working longer hours help to overcome sluggish growth<\/a>? The short answer is no.<\/p>\n The true problem lies not with Germans\u2019 work ethic, but with demographic change and the obstacles that prevent women from taking paid employment.<\/p>\n Get your news from actual experts, straight to your inbox.<\/strong> Sign up to our daily newsletter<\/a> to receive all The Conversation UK\u2019s latest coverage of news and research, from politics and business to the arts and sciences.<\/p>\n That said, Merz is right in one regard. Compared with other industrialised countries, Germans work relatively few hours<\/a>. The average worker there spends 1,343 hours per year on paid employment \u2013 considerably less than in the US (1,799 hours), the UK (1,524) or Greece (1,897, the highest in the EU).<\/p>\n Merz has used these figures to make a seemingly straightforward argument. A country\u2019s wealth is reflected in the amount of goods and services it produces. Producing goods and services requires work. The more people work, the more they can produce. Therefore, working more boosts prosperity.<\/p>\n In reply to this, some economists might note an inverse relation<\/a> between working hours and wealth. In other words, the world\u2019s richest countries have much lower average working times than the world\u2019s poorer countries.<\/p>\n Mexicans work 2,207 hours per year, for example, but their average annual income<\/a> is less than a third of what Germans earn.<\/p>\n However, this is not enough to refute Merz\u2019s argument. Wealthy countries can generally afford to work less because they can rely on advanced technology and robust institutions<\/a> to generate wealth. An example of this is Germany\u2019s successful exportation of hi-tech manufacturing goods<\/a>.<\/p>\n It would, though, be consistent to argue that wealthy countries might be even wealthier if they combined their technological and institutional advantages with additional work hours.<\/p>\n But Merz\u2019s mistake goes beyond correlations between work hours and wealth.<\/p>\n For he doesn\u2019t seem to have considered the unjust obstacles<\/a> \u2013 like gendered social norms and lack of access to childcare \u2013 that women face when they seek full-time jobs. There are many reasons<\/a> why women spend less time on paid work than men, but none of them has to do with laziness.<\/p>\n Second, longer work hours can have unintended negative consequences, because much of the country\u2019s wealth is the result of unpaid labour. Care work, child-rearing, housework and voluntary work are all indispensable to a flourishing society<\/a>. When politicians seek to expand paid work, this often comes at the expense of valuable contributions that are made outside formal labour markets.<\/p>\n Story Continues <\/p>\n A third reason for scepticism has to do with the phenomenon of diminishing returns<\/a> \u2013 the familiar sense that people tend to become less productive as the length of their workday increases. Spending an additional hour in the office, hospital or factory does not translate into additional output if that worker is already exhausted.<\/p>\n So, does this mean there is no reason to worry about how much Germans work? Unfortunately not.<\/p>\n One huge concern is demographic change. Over the coming decades, the number of people in Germany who retire will be much higher than the number of people who join its labour market. Other industrialised countries experience similar trends, but population ageing<\/a> is particularly extreme in Germany.<\/p>\n This means that overall, less work will be done.<\/p>\n In response, a government can attempt to increase birthrates, and it can allow young people from abroad to enter the country.<\/p>\n But stimulating birthrates is notoriously difficult<\/a> and very costly \u2013 not only in Germany but in many countries<\/a> that are trying to achieve this goal.<\/p>\n As for the other option, Spain is among the few industrialised countries that has vowed to leverage migration<\/a> to boost its economy. There are some indications that this strategy is proving successful, with Spain\u2019s economy recently achieving a high growth rate<\/a> of 2.7%, compared with -0.3% in Germany.<\/p>\n According to the president<\/a> of the German Institute for Economic Research, Marcel Fratzscher, Germany should do something similar. He calculates that an additional 400,000 migrants per year over the coming four years are needed to stabilise Germany\u2019s shaky economy.<\/p>\n In this sense, then, Germany does have problem with a lack of work. But Merz may end up making it even worse \u2013 as one of his main political goals is to curb migration<\/a>.<\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n Malte Jauch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People in Germany have taken the idea of a work-life balance too far. To get their economy back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163414,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[33482,68602,2000,299,1945,1824,68601,68603,68604],"class_list":{"0":"post-163413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-countries","9":"tag-demographic-change","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-friedrich-merz","13":"tag-germany","14":"tag-industrialised-countries","15":"tag-paid-employment","16":"tag-working-hours"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} An increase in hours does not equal an increase in work. PeopleImages.com – Yuri A\/Shutterstock<\/a> <\/p>\n