Quebec’s relative growth performance with Ontario has always been an issue of concern for economic historians. In his paper Pierre Fortin discusses trends in Quebec’s real domestic income relative to that in Ontario over the last half-century. He finds that per capita real domestic income in...

Investing in disadvantaged young people is one of the rare public policies with no equity-efficiency tradeoff. This report estimates the potential benefit for the Canadian economy of increasing the educational attainment level of Aboriginal Canadians. We find that increasing the number of...

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...

The objectives of this report are to examine the characteristics of manufacturing in Atlantic Canada and to shed light on the factors behind the productivity gap between Atlantic Canada and Canada in the context of the manufacturing sector. A number of possible factors contributing to the...

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...

In contrast to the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s, the aggregate participation rate in the United States actually rose slightly (up 0.5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997). This US experience provides a useful benchmark for the analysis of the Canadian...

In 2012, business sector software investment per worker in Canada was 40.7 per cent of that in the United States. The objective of this report is to deepen our understanding of the reasons for which Canadian businesses invest substantially less in software than their U.S. counterparts. The...

The objective of this report is to evaluate the impact of the oil and gas industry on labour productivity growth in Canada since 2000 through an exploration of the various channels, both direct and indirect, by which the oil and gas sector affects aggregate productivity. The report sheds light...

Investing in disadvantaged young people is one of the rare public policies with no equity-efficiency tradeoff. Based on the methodology developed in Sharpe, Arsenault and Lapointe (2007), we estimate the effect of increasing the educational attainment level of Aboriginal Canadians on labour...

Productivity and income growth rates and differentials vary widely among OECD countries. In this chapter, Bart van Ark develops a framework for the understanding of these productivity and income differences. The framework breaks GDP per capita into two basic drivers: labour supply and labour...