This paper asks how the performance of self-employed unincorporated businesses affects the size of the gap in labour productivity between Canada and the United States. To do so, the business sector in each country is divided into unincorporated and corporate businesses, and estimates of labour...

Many historical comparisons of international productivity use measures of labour productivity (output per worker). Differences in labour productivity can be caused by differences in technical efficiency or differences in capital intensity. Moving to measures of total factor productivity allows...

This paper has three main objectives. First, it examines the level of multifactor productivity (MFP) in Canada relative to that of the United States for the 1994-to-2003 period. Second, it examines the relative importance of differences in capital intensity and MFP in accounting for the labour...

Official data from statistical agencies are not always ideal for cross-country comparisons because of differences in data sources and methodology. Analysts who engage in cross-country comparisons need to carefully choose among alternatives and sometimes adapt data especially for their purposes....

This paper compares long-run growth in labour productivity in Canada and the United States from 1961 to 2006. Over the entire period labour productivity in both countries grew at about the same rate. But Canadian growth exceeded that of the United States up to the early 1980s. Since then, U.S....

This paper examines the influence of the self-employed on the growth in labour productivity in the business sector. There has been a dramatic expansion of self-employment in the Canadian economy over the 1987 to 1998 period. In addition, a comparison is made of Canadian and United States...

This paper examines the level of labour productivity in Canada relative to that of the United States in 1999. In doing so, it addresses two main issues. The first is the comparability of the measures of GDP and labour inputs that the statistical agency in each country produces. Second, it...

Comparisons of Canada’s economy to that of the United States are done for several purposes. On the one hand, analysts are interested in whether there is an output gap between the two countries — whether Canada is as well off as the United States in terms of the quantities of goods and...