The Impact of Public Infrastructure on Canadian Multifactor Productivity Estimates

This paper makes use of a growth accounting framework to examine the importance of public capital for private sector productivity growth. Most measures of multifactor productivity consider only the inputs of the business sector. This paper produces an alternate measure of multifactor productivity for the business sector that incorporates the impact of public capital. It uses the estimate of the elasticity of business sector output with respect to public capital derived from Macdonald (2008). Over the period, the conventional estimate of MFP growth averages 0.4% per year. About half of this growth is attributable to public capital