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...

William B.P. Robson, a co-author with David Slater of a series of papers on pension issues, has written an ambitious survey of the state of Canadian economic policy in the areas of pensions and health care. He argues that it is appropriate to tackle both issues in the same paper because they are...

Robin Boadway examines the development of fiscal arrangements and considers the substantial fiscal decentralization that has occurred in Canada over the past 20 years. Boadway makes the case that the fiscal arrangements have played an important role in improving the performance of the Canadian...

Lars Osberg makes the case in his paper that the major success story of Canadian social policy in the twentieth century has in fact been the reduction of poverty among senior citizens. According to Osberg, the poverty rate, defined with the poverty line measured as one-half median equivalent...

It is well recognized that the incomes of the elderly are on average much lower than those of the non-elderly reflecting their limited participation in the labour market. But do the elderly have lower levels of economic well-being? Indeed, the financial circumstances of the elderly differ...

The purpose of this report is to shed light on the dynamics and determinants of productivity growth in nine selected natural resource industries and in the overall natural resource sector in Canada. This report provides a concise review of the findings of a detailed analysis undertaken by the...

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...

The objective of this paper is to document the evolution of the Canada-U.S. labour productivity gap and to offer an explanation of why Americans have been and continue to be, on average, more productive than Canadians. This focus on relative productivity levels is in contrast to the typical...

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...