A recent OECD report has some interesting and somewhat surprising findings on the amount of time people around the world spend working. For years economists have struggled to pin-point the factors that lead a country to become wealthy. Intuitively a country with advanced technology and hard working people would come out on top.

The OECD numbers, however, show that this linear relationship does not exist. For instance, an average South Korean works almost 1000 hours per year longer than the average Norwegian, while enjoying half the GDP per person. Both countries rank in the top in terms of their use of advanced technologies – Korea might even have a slight edge in terms of internet and mobile adoption. Granted, there are many other factors at play including natural resource wealth, distortions such as wars, workforce participation rates and cultural norms. However, the differences are significant even between seemingly similar countries such as Germany and Italy.

The rough consensus among economists is that in the long term, productivity is key; that is how efficiently a country puts together its labor and capital. The OECD numbers seem to support that view, however, it is surprising that the differences can be that great. One thing is for sure – it seems that the Norwegians and the Dutch have it figured out.