Gabriel Zucman
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gabrielzucman.bsky.social
Gabriel Zucman
@gabrielzucman.bsky.social

Chasing wealth and income, present and past, onshore and offshore.
https://gabriel-zucman.eu
https://www.taxobservatory.eu

Gabriel Zucman is a French economist who is currently a chaired professor at the Paris School of Economics, a summer research professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, and the director of the EU Tax Observatory in Paris. .. more

Economics 58%
Business 22%
Pinned
Aujourd’hui sort mon nouveau livre «Les milliardaires ne paient pas d’impôt sur le revenu et nous allons y mettre fin.»🧵

Reposted by Gabriel Zucman

C'est offert à Noël à chaque membre de ma famille et de ma belle famille.
Et de ma fille de 11 ans.

Rien a foutre.

There are also differences in the measurement of hours worked

ILO, which along with WIL has the most comprehensive treatment of hours worked, has a 13% gap between US and EU27 (and virtually 0 with core EU)

ilostat.ilo.org/topics/labou...
Statistics on labour productivity - ILOSTAT
This topic page on labour productivity provides access to statistical information including data, methods, publications and more.
ilostat.ilo.org

Reposted by Justin H. Kirkland

Which does not mean that the EU needs no reform:

The key priority should be to invest massively in education, universities, research, public infrastructure, and energy transition

The key to its future productivity and prosperity

/end

Reposted by Philippe Quirion

More leisure, better health outcomes, less inequality, less carbon emissions, all of which with broadly similar productivity:

The EU can be proud of its development model, and the Trumpists (and European conservatives that echo them) should keep it down a bit

Why?

Because neither ILO, OECD, WIL, etc. subtract the depreciation of natural capital

The US produces $81 of gross output per hour, but at a particularly high cost for the planet

The EU27 produces $71 of gross output per hour, but with dramatically less carbon emissions

This explains why the productivity numbers are lower in WIL (and the US-EU27 gap a bit lower too)

More importantly, all of these numbers over-estimate the productivity gap between US and EU27:

There is in fact a good case to be made that EU27 is more productive

Side note: International agencies like ILO measure productivity by dividing gross output (GDP) by the number of hours worked

WIL focuses on net output (GDP minus capital depreciation)

This is more meaningful: producing assets that depreciate fast is not particularly productive

Reposted by Kai Gehring

And there is no sclerosis: in the medium-term productivity is growing at the same pace in Europe and the US

prod.wid.world/www-site/upl...

Even so the difference is modest

For instance, in the ILO statistics, GDP per hour worked is $81.8 in the US, $83 in Western Europe, and $71.1 in the EU27

ilostat.ilo.org/topics/labou...
Statistics on labour productivity - ILOSTAT
This topic page on labour productivity provides access to statistical information including data, methods, publications and more.
ilostat.ilo.org

If we add the rest of the EU, then we have an economy with 450 million inhabitants, significantly larger than the US

In that bigger economy, productivity is slightly lower than in the US, because of relatively low productivity in Eastern Europe
Now with the same productivity as the US, “core EU” also has more leisure time, higher life expectancy, less inequality

No matter how you look at it, it is a clearly superior economic performance

Reposted by Aaron Sojourner

You can get slightly different numbers with older series, different price indices, different measures of output, etc.

But none of this fundamentally changes the basic fact that “core EU” is about as productive as the US
Core EU has 290 million inhabitants: it's a bit smaller than the US (340m) but not much so

The key fact is that productivity in this core EU is essentially the same as in the US:

€60 per hour (corrected for price differences) using the most recent WID.world data

prod.wid.world/www-site/upl...

To see that, we can look at domestic output per hour worked – the standard measure of productivity

These productivity numbers have their limits, that I’ll get back to

But let’s look first at the 6 “core” EU countries: Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium

Reposted by Kai Gehring

To be sure, there is a large gap in the ~level~ of GDP per capita:

US GDP per capita is 35%-40% higher than in the EU

But that gap is overwhelmingly due to the fact that people work fewer hours in the EU – not that Europeans are less productive
Adjusted for the difference in price level, GDP per capita has grown 70% in the US since 1990 vs. 63% in the EU27

This corresponds to an annual growth rate of 1.6% in the US vs. 1.5% in the EU.

The US has been doing better post-Covid, but over the medium run no big divergence
A lot of the “eurosclerosis” discourse is based on comparing GDP in nominal US$ in Europe vs US

Yesterday, the US ambassador to the EU compared Europe’s GDP per capita to that of Mississippi

This makes little sense, because it ignores the higher cost of living in the US
It has become received wisdom in Brussels and Washington that there is a new “euro-sclerosis”: that the EU economy is lagging the US

This view is wrong

A little primer on the measurement of productivity – and why reports of the economic death of Europe are greatly exaggerated🧵

Reposted by Karel Lannoo

Reposted by Gabriel Zucman

Reposted by Gabriel Zucman

Un grand merci aux aixoises et aux aixois d'être venus si nombreux à Sciences Po pour parler de l'avenir de la justice fiscale et de la démocratie.

La tournée de conférences publiques se poursuivra en 2026 dans toute la France -- à très bientôt !