Symposium on Labour Force Participation in Canada in the 1990s: An Introduction and Overview

A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s has been the decline in labour force participation. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium of articles that explore this issue. The idea for this symposium came out of a December 1997 workshop on labour force participation organized by the Canadian Employment Research Forum. The Centre for the Study of Living Standards and Human Resources Development Canada then organized two sessions on labour force participation at the annual meeting of the Canadian Economics Association in May 1998 where these papers were first presented. The papers were then refereed and revised for publication. This introduction sets the context for the symposium that follows by presenting basic data on labour force participation rate trends and summarizing and synthesizing the key findings of the five articles.