The demand for skilled trade persons in Canada is very strong and new apprenticeship registrations increased by threefold between 1991 and 2007. The number of apprenticeship completions however, did not increase and as a result average completion rates have dropped over the same period. A CLSRN...

The last decade has seen an increasing volume of research that reveals significant gaps in literacy and Essential Skills (LES) among the Canadian workforce. In addition to having negative impacts on firms’ productivity, research also suggests that workers suffer consequences of low...

The paper tests the role of agglomeration effects on the export decision of services firms. Recent theories on trade with heterogeneous firms predict that export participation goes along with sunk market-entry costs. Only the more productive firms will be able to overcome these sunk costs. This...

The sector business services contributes directly and indirectly to aggregate economic growth in Europe. The direct contribution comes from the sector’s own dynamism. Though the business-services industry appears to be characterised by strong cyclical volatility, there was also a strong...

While there is considerable empirical evidence on the impact of liberalizing trade in goods, the effects of services liberalization have not been empirically established. This study examines the link between services sector reforms and the productivity of manufacturing industries relying on...

Conventional explanations for the post-1991 growth of India’s manufacturing sector focus on goods trade liberalization and industrial de-licensing. We demonstrate the powerful contribution of a neglected factor: India’s policy reforms in services. The link between these reforms and the...

This paper advances the analysis of regional income convergence inColombia, through the use of the income data recently estimated for the departments,the main subnational political units. The results show a polarization process betweenBogotá and the rest of the departments. The preponderance of...

This essay employs nonparametric and spatial techniques commonly used in the Spatial Economics literature to study the labor productivity of the central region of Mexico at the municipio (county) level. In particular, we measure the spatial autocorrelation of the labor productivity and use a...

Financial relations have been deeply transformed in the 1980s and 1990s by deregulation and liberalization. Among the most affected by these changes has been the banking system. Domestic banks have generally lost the implicit protection given by regulatory barriers to entry. Until very recently,...

The paper uses data from 5,507 municipalities in Brazil to estimate the relationships between climate and income as well as climate and health, and then uses the estimated relationships to gauge the effects of past and future climate change on income levels and life expectancy in each of these...