Productivity research is Canada has traditionally focused on narrow economic issues. In our view, it has given inadequate attention to the broader ramifications of productivity, both in terms of shedding light on the importance of productivity for the advancement of various aspects of social...

William B.P. Robson, a co-author with David Slater of a series of papers on pension issues, has written an ambitious survey of the state of Canadian economic policy in the areas of pensions and health care. He argues that it is appropriate to tackle both issues in the same paper because they are...

This paper first reviews apprenticeship trends in Canada over the last two decades. It then examines prospects for labour market conditions for the total economy and for the construction sector to the year 2005 based on scenarios developed by the forecasting firm Informetrica for the IAS...

In 2012, business sector software investment per worker in Canada was 40.7 per cent of that in the United States. The objective of this report is to deepen our understanding of the reasons for which Canadian businesses invest substantially less in software than their U.S. counterparts. The...

A strong case can be made that the quality of governance provided by the government of Canada deteriorated somewhat from May 2011 to May 2013. While the government has constructed high-quality governance structures and implemented effective policies in many areas over many decades, the actions...

The Index of Economic Well-Being (IEWB) – a composite indicator consisting of consumption, wealth, equality, and economic security – underwent several changes in the weighting of its components. For example, the final aggregation of the IEWB was changed to equal weighting after the IEWB was...

The objective of this report is to evaluate the impact of the oil and gas industry on labour productivity growth in Canada since 2000 through an exploration of the various channels, both direct and indirect, by which the oil and gas sector affects aggregate productivity. The report sheds light...

The objective of this report is to provide an overview of trends in income inequality, defined as the Gini coefficient, in Canada and the provinces over the 1981-2010 period and to investigate the impact of redistributive policies – namely, taxes and transfers – on these trends.Income...

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...