Machine Learning models are often considered to be "black boxes" that provide only little room for the incorporation of theory (cf. e.g. Mukherjee, 2017; Veltri, 2017). This article proposes so-called Dynamic Factor Trees (DFT) and Dynamic Factor Forests (DFF) for macroeconomic forecasting, which...

Canada’s living standards have been falling relative to those in the United States in recent years. The Chairman and CEO of the TD Bank Financial Group, Charles Baillie (2001) has suggested that Canadians adopt as a societal goal not only the reversal of this downward trend, but that Canadian...

The Canadian service sector has performed well in recent years in terms of labour and multifactor productivity growth, both in absolute terms and relative to the United States, offsetting much of the poorer performance of the manufacturing sector. Service sector labour productivity growth has...

This eleventh issue of the International Productivity Monitor, published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, contains seven articles on a range of topics: policies to improve productivity growth in Canada; the causes of lower information and communications technology investment in...

Since 2000, productivity growth in Canada and the United States have followed markedly different paths. In the second article, Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards finds that the remarkable productivity growth experienced in the United States in the past two years is...

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...

A key objective of economic policy in Canada is to reduce the productivity gap with the United States. The development of appropriate policies to attain this goal requires a thorough understanding of the nature of the gap, including its industry dimensions. Unfortunately, statistical agencies do...

The review article first presents a brief overview of each chapter, focusing on the main contributions of the respective authors. This does not fully do justice to their work since these chapters include much more than can be considered here, but it will provide a useful summary of the main...

Measurement of productivity in the service sector has always represented a challenge for economists. "Productivity in the U.S. Services Sector: New Sources of Economic Growth", by Jack Triplett and Barry Bosworth from the Brookings Institution is reviewed. The authors have produced a textbook on...

This article by Raynauld Letourneau and Martine Lajoie of Industry Canada provides a detailed regional analysis of levels of living standards, measured as output per capita, and productivity (output per worker) for the 1995-97 period, the most recent data currently available. They find that all...