In this chapter, Don Drummond makes the case that with large deficits there was little room for the Bank of Canada to reduce interest rates to stimulate the economy and generate revenues. It was imperative that the deficit be eliminated. Tax rates were already high so the government had no...

In this chapter, Pierre Fortin provides a critique of the conduct of Canadian monetary policy in the 1990s, a critique that he developed throughout the decade. While not denying that the US economic slowdown in the early 1990s reduced growth in Canada, Fortin lays the blame for the inferior...

Of the three major age groups, youth (aged 15-24), experienced the largest fall in labour force participation and accounted for the lion’s share of the aggregate decline. Consequently, an understanding of the factors behind this development is essential to an overall understanding of the fall...

In this chapter, Paul Jenkins and Brian O'Reilly survey the monetary policy developments in the 1990s, focusing on links between monetary policy and the economic well-being of Canadians. The Bank of Canada economists do admit that tight monetary policy in the early 1990s hurt growth in the...

A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s has been the decline in labour force participation. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium of articles that explore this issue. The idea for this symposium came out of a December 1997 workshop on labour...

Labour force participation rates vary greatly by age, with persons 55 and over having much lower participation rates than younger persons. Consequently, changes in the demographic composition of the population can exert a long-run effect on aggregate participation rates. In the third article of...

In contrast to the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s, the aggregate participation rate in the United States actually rose slightly (up 0.5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997). This US experience provides a useful benchmark for the analysis of the Canadian...

In recent years, the productivity performance of oil and gas extraction in Canada has been dismal. Based on official real GDP and labour input estimates from Statistics Canada, labour productivity in oil and gas extraction fell 8.23 per cent per year between the 2000 cyclical peak and 2007, with...

The forest products sector in Canada has faced hard times since 2000. In terms of productivity growth, the sector as a whole has performed poorly relative to the total-economy average. Labour productivity in the sector grew by 0.38 per cent per year between 2000 and 2007, below the economy-wide...

In recent years, the productivity performance of mining in Canada has been very poor. Based on official real GDP and labour input estimates from Statistics Canada, labour productivity in mining fell by 2.21 per cent per year between the 2000 cyclical peak and 2007, with capital productivity down...