The gap between Canadian and U.S. living standards widened considerably in the 1990s. Americans, on average, were 16 per cent better off in terms of real personal income per capita in 2000 than in 1989, while Canadians experienced a 5 percent increase in real incomes. The thesis of this paper is...

The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has in recent years devoted considerable resources to the study of productivity trends in the OECD area. In this article, Dirk Pilat, a senior economist at the OECD provides an overview of the key results of this research effort....

Since 2000, business sector labour productivity growth in Canada has averaged 0.95 per cent, 0.60 percentage points below the long-term trend established over the 1973-2000 period (1.55 per cent). In the United States productivity growth has continued to be robust beyond 2000, averaging 2.60 per...

Germany's recovery from an unemployment disease and its resilience to the Great Recession is remarkable. Its success story makes it a showcase for labor policy and labor market reforms. This paper assesses the potential of the German experience as a model for effective, evidence-based...

In this paper, I present a framework for the comparative analysis of the national/regional dynamics of accumulation, technical change and employment from a (here, only sectorally) disaggregated point of view. It focuses on the characteristics of "dynamic variety" and is oriented to empirical...

The foundation for real income growth is productivity growth. This basic principle of economics is well illustrated in this article by Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards on the determinants of trends in living standards in Canada in the 1990s. He shows that over the...

This is a review article by Andrew Sharpe from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards of Angus Maddison's path-breaking new book, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. The article summarizes Maddison's key findings in a number of areas, with particular emphasis on his estimates of...

La localisation preferentielles des agents economiques se traduit de facto par la persistance des disparites regionales. Sur le plan empirique, deux pistes ont ete empruntees: la premiere visant a estimer quantitativement les disparites (au niveaus national ou international), tandis que la...

Three main vantage points are brought together in this paper: (1) Israel’s relatively good economic performance in recent years – at least, in comparison with other Western countries that have still not emerged from the recession; (2) motivations for the wave of social protests that erupted...