Figures are right. But look at the metric. It’s GDP per employed worker.
Have you ever been to Japan? If you have, have you noticed how many more people there are in service businesses? Filling stations have one or two forecourt workers to fill your car and clean your windscreen for you. Larger shops often have greeters at the door whose only purpose is to welcome customers and answer questions. Even in casual restaurants, there’s more floor staff than you see in the UK. You see evidence of this in Japan’s low unemployment figures. The other factor depressing output per worker is that, unlike the USA and UK, these Japanese “overhead” jobs are still reasonably well paid, which offsets the highly productive Japanese manufacturing and services sectors.
If you look at productivity per hour worked, the other common metric (https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm), places shift a little: now Japan moves up between Germany and France, and the UK moves ahead of Italy (or rather, Italy falls behind the USA and UK). The reason for Japan’s rise is that many of those Japanese low-productivity jobs are part-time, but the per-employee figure treated someone doing three hours a day bowing to customers at Mitsukoshi at busy times exactly the same as someone putting in a nine hour shift in a pharmaceuticals plant. The UK and USA’s rise under the per-hour metric is more likely to be due to the high prevalence of zero-hour work agreements in these countries: when you only count an employee for the exact hour that they’re producing for you, your productivity per hour can only go higher.
