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Spoiler: "Iceland’s economy is outperforming most European peers"
Saved me a click, TY!

France also tried out shorter work week and the articles I read about it implied it was a failure. Maybe it was biased reporting so that the idea wouldn't catch on here, though.

It could also be cultural differences, a selection bias in the participants, differing criteria for "success/productivity"... or a thousand other reasons, too. It's easy to jump to a conclusion or speculate why a desired outcome wasn't the actual outcome; but the best you can probably say is you just don't know why one was a "success" and the other a "failure" and look for a study of the reasons for a given outcome.

I find it rare that popular reporting gets to the nuance required to really understand a research outcome much less to ascribe plausible, grounded reasons for that outcome.

French here, working/living in France, and not aware of any state-backed “shorter work week” test. According to my research, only SME applied it so far (with 2 exceptions of 1000 and 11k-employees). And no particular consensus on the results (many companies stayed on their 4d agenda after the initial phases, but again, we’re talking SME here).
Lots of scale differences here though, Iceland has like 400k people and is around the 180th in terms of population. Good to see, but I would say hard to compare with larger countries.
I fail to see your point here. If anything, shorter working weeks would have a bigger impact on countries with lower populations
God forbid them dropping the click bait and use your much better headline, which would actually make me want to read the article. (We could maybe add "after shortening the work week")