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 importance of skills for innovation and productivity; the diffusion …

This article, by Ian A. Stewart, is a review of the recently released Industry Canada research volume Productivity … the volume represents an important contribution to the productivity literature in Canada. He points out that data and … the macroeconomic perspective in the analysis of productivity growth. He believes that the golden age of productivity …

.S. productivity levels during the postwar period and finds strong evidence for this phenomenon up to 1990, with rapid growth in … investment, education, and R&D in OECD countries accounting for the catch-up. The process of convergence seems to have ended in … the narrowing of the productivity gap with the United States, and perhaps most important, the acceleration of productivity …

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 productivity. Labour supply is in turn determined by the hours worked per …

/EU productivity gap. We find robust evidence that US firms have a higher capacity to translate R&D into productivity gains (especially … in the high-tech industries), and this contributes to explaining the higher productivity of US firms. Conversely, EU … firms are more likely to achieve productivity gains through capital-embodied technological change at least in medium and low …

We estimate the effects of technology investments on the demand for skilled workers using longitudinally integrated … unobservable components within each business for each year from 1992 to 1997. We measure technology using variables from the Annual … between advanced technology and skill in a cross-sectional analysis of businesses in both sectors. The more comprehensive …