The paper examines how Canadian manufacturing plants have responded to reductions in tariff barriers between Canada and the rest of world over the past two decades. Three main conclusions emerge from the analysis. First, trade liberalization was a significant factor behind the strong export...

This study is one of a series that examines how technology adoption affects the skills of workers. Previous papers in the series have approached this issue in different ways with data from a variety of sources. Using data on the strategies and activities of small and medium-sized firms in both...

Small firms are often seen to be the engines of growth. There are two main sources of empirical evidence that are adduced to support this conclusion. The first is that job creation has been coming mainly from small firms. The second is that the share of employment accounted for by small firms...

This study uses new GDP estimates for the unincorporated sector in order to examine labour productivity in the unincorporated sector and to compare it to that in the corporate sector over the period 1987 to 2005. The level of nominal GDP per hour worked is significantly lower for unincorporated...

The nature of the competitive process that causes a reallocation of market shares within an industry contributes to aggregate productivity growth. This paper extends our understanding of industry differences in the competitive process by examining firm turnover and productivity growth in various...

This paper asks how the performance of self-employed unincorporated businesses affects the size of the gap in labour productivity between Canada and the United States. To do so, the business sector in each country is divided into unincorporated and corporate businesses, and estimates of labour...

This paper develops a measure of intangible capital and examines the contribution of intangibles to labour productivity growth in the Canadian business sector. It applies the methodology developed by Corrado et al. (2005, 2009) for the United States. The paper finds that investment in...

Many historical comparisons of international productivity use measures of labour productivity (output per worker). Differences in labour productivity can be caused by differences in technical efficiency or differences in capital intensity. Moving to measures of total factor productivity allows...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...