US workers are the world's most productive, but they put in more hours than Europeans to score higher, according to a study by the United Nations.

Workers in France, Belgium and Norway beat the Americans in productivity per hour, the International Labor Organization said in its new issue of Key Indicators of the Labor Market released Monday.

Output per person employed in the United States last year was US$60,728, the report said. Belgium, the highest-scoring European Union member, had US$54,333.

``Part of the difference in output per worker was due to the fact that Americans worked longer hours than their European counterparts,'' the ILO said. ``US workers put in an average of 1,825 hours in 2002.''

Japanese worked about the same number of hours as Americans, but in major European economies the average ranged from 1,300 to 1,800 hours, it said.

``In terms of output per person employed, the US is on top,'' said Dorothea Schmidt, an economist on the team that produced the 855-page report.

``In terms of output per hour we have three European countries doing better than the US _ that's Belgium, Norway and France, and they have done so ever since the mid-80s,'' Schmidt said.

Norwegians lead the league, with an output of US$38 per hour worked last year.
French workers were in second place, with an average of US$35 an hour, the report said. Belgians were third at US$34. US workers were in fourth place at US$32 per hour worked.

Schmidt said it wasn't clear why the three countries outscored the United States.
``There are many, many reasons,'' she said. ``One might be that during the time that these people work, they work more efficiently. It might be that the technology they use enables them to be@efficient in this one hour.''

The differences were not that great, she said. ``It's not that they do twice the work that a US worker does. It's the small things. If you work 15 hours a day, of course there are hours when you are not as productive as if you only work six hours a day.''

But working less is not necessary the key, as is shown by most other European Union countries that trail the United States, she said. It also depends on such factors as motivation, skills and training.

The report found that in most countries the number of hours worked had been going down over the past three years in conjunction with the decline in the world economy.

The US figure of 1,825 hours worked in 2002 was down from 1,834 in 2000, it said. Norwegian hours worked dropped from to 1,342 from 1,380 over the same period.

Swedish hours worked went to 1,581 from 1,625. In France they went to 1,545 from 1,587. In Australia to 1,824 from 1,855, in Canada to 1,778 from 1,807, in Ireland from 1,668 to 1,690 and in Germany to 1,444 from 1,463.

The ILO said US productivity has been growing twice as fast as that in Europe and Japan over the past seven years.

The report said the high overall US productivity resulted in part from two factors.
The first is that the US economy provides an environment for widespread use of information and communications technology. The second is that it has had more growth of wholesale and retail trade and financial securities using the technology.

Schmidt said that the report also looked at productivity in agriculture, where technology proved to be a huge advantage. For example, she said, an agricultural worker in the United States produces 650 times more than the worker in Vietnam.

But she said the report, which was based on government-supplied figures and other data, shouldn't be taken to mean that workers in developing countries were lazy or inefficient.

``If you are talking about developing countries, it's not fair to say that these people are not efficient,'' she told reporters. ``They are working hard. They are probably working harder than other people.

``It's just because they do not have the technology that they cannot perform that well.''

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