EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Operating Hours in the EU: the Role of Strategy, Structure and Context

Lei Delsen () and Jeroen Smits ()
Additional contact information
Lei Delsen: Radboud University Nijmegen
Jeroen Smits: Radboud University Nijmegen

Chapter 3 in Comparative Analyses of Operating Hours and Working Times in the European Union, 2009, pp 55-82 from Springer

Abstract: Long and flexible operating hours, and opening and service hours are key indicators of economic performance. Extending operating times and a more flexible organisation of work are important policy instruments to improve competitiveness of a single enterprise, a sector or an economy (European Commission, 1995; Betancourt and Clague, 1981; Anxo et al., 1995; Delsen et al., 2007). A prolongation of operating times and opening hours may increase average capital productivity and ultimately increase profitability, reduce unit costs, and generate more jobs and/or higher wages. For these reasons, both governments and companies consider operating hours a strategic goal of macroeconomic policy (European Commission, 1995). At the macro level, operating hours depend on the openness of the economy, its industrial and sectoral structure, and the size of plants in the country. Also the business cycle situation is of importance. Figure 3.1 shows that among the six EU countries covered by the EUCOWE survey there are considerable differences in the weekly operating hours – defined as the weekly business hours, including preparation times and times for maintenance – ranging from 60.4 hours in Germany to 47.3 hours in Spain. These figures concern the direct measurement of operating hours of establishments. The direct measure is calculated from the answers given by the respondents to the question “How many hours did your establishment operate in a typical week in March or April 2003?”.1

Keywords: Shift Work; Capacity Utilisation; Longe Operating; Overtime Work; Establishment Size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-7908-2185-7_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783790821857

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-7908-2185-7_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Contributions to Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:spr:conchp:978-3-7908-2185-7_3