I’m a little amazed that Singapore is the only Asian country to make it to the top 10

do you not see what's going on here? context. Luxemburg and Ireland are the two European tax havens. Most transnational corporations have their EU headquarters in either of these two countries (Facebook sits in Ireland, Amazon in Luxemburg, for instance). For tax purposes, they register their europe-wide profits there, with the staff needed to do this bureaucratic interfacing. For this reason, also, these are banking centers. The European rich keep their money in these places. This goes especially for Switzerland, 6 on the list. So what's actually happening is that the productivity of workers in -other- countries gets registered in these two. (not to speak of the neocolonial exploitation and the productivity of people in the global south, which gets registered as profits of multinationals, which in turn sit in.. Luxemburg and Ireland and most of the other countries in that list). The diea that their -workers- are more productive, based on a simple GDP divided by working population napkin math, is a bit.. thin, to state it mildly.

Currently, 80% of Luxembourg's population growth is due to immigration. The proportion of foreigners living in Luxembourg was 47.3% on January 1, 2024. In 1961, the percentage of foreigners was just 13.2%. This explains a lot

If you took out government spending, which is not productive, European countries would still be around the top, but less overwhelmingly so.