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...

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...

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...

The living standards in Canada, defined as real GDP per capita, declined relative to those in the United States in the 1990s. A key challenge facing Canadians is the reversal of this situation. In this article, Andrew Sharpe of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards develops a framework...

Analysis of youth unemployment indicates: (i) The ratio of youth-adult rates exhibits a u-shaped pattern, declining markedly from 1976 to 1983, levelling off from 1984 to 1990, but rising sharply thereafter, mainly for teenagers; (ii) the pattern results from the combination of a relative...

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...