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...

This the inaugural issue of the International Productivity Monitor, a new publication produced by the Ottawa-based Centre for the Study of Living Standards (CSLS). The objective of the Monitor is to focus atttention on the importance of productivity for improving living standards and quality of...

In modern economies, technical change is rapid and competitive edges of companies are closely related to 'intangible' capital. While some intangibles are covered by established capital measures in the national accounts, many are outside the measurement boundary. The NBER volume at hand brings...

Has the economy fundamentally changed in the 1990s because of the introduction of information technology or is the impact of IT not so much "new" as larger than before? In this article, Barry Bosworth and Jack Triplett of the Brooking Institution examine this issue with a detailed analysis of...

The factors behind the emergence of the New Economy are still poorly understood. In this article, Pascal Petit from CEPREMAP and CNRS in France provides an institutional perspective on the developmental phases or roots of this New Economy. He analyzes the structural, institutional and...

The economic slowdown of 2001 reduced productivity growth in both the United States and Canada. This development has raised the question of the sustainability or permanency of the pace of productivity growth experienced during the 1995-2000 period in the United States and the likelihood of...

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has in recent years devoted considerable resources to the study of productivity trends in the OECD area. In this article, Dirk Pilat, a senior economist at the OECD provides an overview of the key results of this research effort....

The fourth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains five articles. Topics covered are: recent productivity developments in the United States and Canada and implications for the Canada-U.S. productivity and income gaps; the...

While much attention has focused on the factors that brought about the so-called new economy, much less attention has been paid to optimal policy responses following the establishment of the new economy. In the third article, Gilbert Cette and Christian Pfister from the Bank of France provide...

This report presents a framework for decomposing aggregate productivity growth into within-sector effects and sectoral reallocation effects. This framework is used to analyze productivity growth in 12 Canadian industries for the 1961-2007 period and for several subperiods. The results do not...