Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these...

The issue of sustainability of natural capital and implications for economic growth ranks high in the interests of both policy makers and the general public, as manifested by the intense debate on Canada's ratification of the Kyoto accord. In this chapter, Nancy Olewiler makes an important...

In this chapter, Tony Fisher and Doug Hostland provide an historical perspective on trends in labour productivity, labour income and living standards in Canada. They find that, once the appropriate adjustments are made, the labour share and the non-labour share (composed of profits, interest and...

In this chapter, Graves and Jenkins explore the attitudes of Canadians to productivity. The distinction between our standard of living and our quality of life is a powerful one for Canadians generally. The economic citizen who emerges from Graves and Jenkins data is relatively aware of the terms...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough discussion of the definitional and data issues associated with the measurement of aggregate labour productivity growth in Canada and the United States. The paper examines all data sources for output, employment and hours estimates in the two...

Productivity research is Canada has traditionally focused on narrow economic issues. In our view, it has given inadequate attention to the broader ramifications of productivity, both in terms of shedding light on the importance of productivity for the advancement of various aspects of social...

In this chapter, William Watson challenges Heath's interpretation of the benefits of productivity growth, but agrees with Richard Harris' views on the state of our knowledge about the potential contribution of social programs to productivity growth. Watson tackles Heath's assessment of the...

The Impact of Interprovincial Migration on Aggregate Output and Labour Productivity in Canada, 1987-2006

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...

In this chapter, Richard Harris points out that a traditional view has been that there is an inherent conflict between economic efficiency and social equality, a view neatly summarized in the title of Okun's famous book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-off (1975). This view gained renewed...