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

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

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...

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

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 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