This report develops internationally comparable estimates of the Human Development Index (HDI) for the Canadian provinces and territories over the 2000-2011 period. The HDI is a composite index composed of three dimensions (life expectancy, education and income) measured by four indicators (life...

We use the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being (LIMEW), the most comprehensive income measure available to date, to compare economic well-being in Canada and the United States in the first decade of the 21st century. This study represents the first international comparison based on...

Innovation is an important driver of productivity growth, which in turn is a major source of improvement in living standards. Given the growing importance of the natural resources sector in the Canadian economy, innovation in this sector is particularly relevant. This report, using a...

The objective of this report is to examine Aboriginal labour market performance in Canada from 2007 to 2011 using data from the Labour Force Survey, which excludes people living on-reserve or in the territories. This is performed by first providing an overview of how the recession affected the...

Despite labour productivity growth somewhat above the national average over the 1997-2000 period, Nova Scotia’s level of business sector output per hour in 2010 was only 75.7 per cent that of Canada. This report provides a detailed analysis of Nova Scotia’s labour and capital productivity...

In 2011, business sector investment per worker in information and communications technology (ICT) in Canada was only 57.8 per cent of the U.S. level, indicating an ICT investment per worker gap of 42.2 percentage points. Numerous explanations have been advanced to explain this gap, one of which...

Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these...

The issue of sustainability of natural capital and implications for economic growth ranks high in the interests of both policy makers and the general public, as manifested by the intense debate on Canada's ratification of the Kyoto accord. In this chapter, Nancy Olewiler makes an important...

In this chapter by Janice Stein warns about the dangers of adopting a narrow conception of productivity and efficiency. Building on her analysis in The Cult of Efficiency, she argues that the language of efficiency, understood narrowly as cost-effectiveness, confronts distinctive problems when...

In this chapter, Andrew Heisz, Andrew Jackson and Garnet Picot provide an incisive and comprehensive analysis of the distributional changes that have occurred in Canada in the 1990s as well as useful comparative perspectives both in terms of trends over time and the particular patterns that can...