In this paper, we propose a decomposition technique to examine the sources of industrial contribution to aggregate labour productivity growth. We show that in terms of pure labour productivity growth, the manufacturing and service sectors contributed equally to the aggregate Canada-U.S. labour...

This paper examines the trend in the importance of small producers in the Canadian and U.S. manufacturing sectors from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. It finds similar trends in both countries. Small plants increased their share of employment up to the 1990s but their share remained stable in...

The Canadian service sector has performed well in recent years in terms of labour and multifactor productivity growth, both in absolute terms and relative to the United States, offsetting much of the poorer performance of the manufacturing sector. Service sector labour productivity growth has...

The slower productivity growth in Canada relative to that experienced in the United States in the second half of the 1990s has been a matter of great concern to Canadians, with a wide variety of explanations put forward to account for this development. A key issue is whether this slower...