Belgians are best workers

21 February 2007

BRUSSELS – Belgian workers are second only to their Luxembourg colleagues in terms of productivity in Europe. This emerged from a European comparison published on Tuesday. The question is whether this perhaps puts a strain on family life, considering that Belgium has the highest divorce rate in all of Europe.

Belgian workers scored well above the European average both in productivity per employed person as per hour worked.

The newest statistics yearbook from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics bureau, shows that the productivity of the Belgian worker was 28.5 percent higher than the European average (in 2004).

In comparison, the productivity of Dutch workers was 16.5 percent higher than the European average. German workers were only 5.8 percent more productive than the average.

Belgians also worked a lot harder in the past several years: Belgian productivity was up just under 4 percent since 2000. This increase was only 2.4 percent for the Netherlands and 0.3 percent for Germany.

Subject: Belgian news