Economic growth basically means that workers get more productive. Less hours of work means more output. GDP growth is not really possible without making workers more efficient.
In principle it is possible for GDP to grow even if productivity per hour stays constant provided the number of hours worked goes up. I've heard that's an important factor to consider when comparing the GDPs of France and the US, so it's not that unlikely it also is when comparing the GDP of a country in year X and that of the same country in year X+10. (But of course such a thing couldn't go on arbitrarily far because there are only so many hours in a day.)
When comparing accross countries, I wouldn't be surprised if different countries had different methodologies for calculating GDP. The differences don't have to be obvious at the first sight. For example, both countries may agree that GDP = X + Y + Z, but there may be a huge difference in how exactly they calculate X, Y, and Z. Also, gray economy may or may not be included, and may be estimated incorrectly.
(Sometimes such changes are done for obvious political reasons, for example in my country a government once reduced unemployment by simply changing the d...
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