The high cost of capital for firms conducting medical research and development (R&D) has been partly attributed to the government risk facing investors in medical innovation. This risk slows down medical innovation because investors must be compensated for it. We propose new and simple financial...

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...

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...

Estimates produced by the OECD indicate that labour productivity levels are higher in a number of European countries than in the United States, implying that Europe and not the United States is the world technological leader. The author argues that a structural measure of labour productivity,...

Thist article by Andrew Sharpe and Leila Gharani from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards examines the factors behind slow productivity growth in Canada in the second half of the 1990s, in marked contrast to the acceleration of productivity in the United States, and discusses the...

This tenth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the puzzling recent behaviour of labour productivity in Canada; an international perspective on Canada's productivity performance since the...

This article, which is closely related to the previous article, is also by Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards. It points out that there now appears to be a renaissance in productivity growth in the U.S. service sector, with output per worker growing five times faster...

The ninth issue of the International Productivity Monitor published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the magnitude of the Canada-U.S. productivity gap at the industry level; productivity puzzles facing researchers; the link between...

Has the economy fundamentally changed in the 1990s because of the introduction of information technology or is the impact of IT not so much "new" as larger than before? In this article, Barry Bosworth and Jack Triplett of the Brooking Institution examine this issue with a detailed analysis of...

The United States and European Union differ significantly in terms of their innovative capacity: the former have been able to gain and maintain world leadership in innovation and technology while the latter continues to lag. Notwithstanding the magnitude of this innovation gap and the political...