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...

Productivity and income growth rates and differentials vary widely among OECD countries. In this chapter, Bart van Ark develops a framework for the understanding of these productivity and income differences. The framework breaks GDP per capita into two basic drivers: labour supply and labour...

In this chapter, Andrew Sharpe provides a comprehensive non-technical introduction to the productivity issue, including discussion of productivity concepts, measurement issues, trends and prospects. He begins by noting that productivity is the relationship between the output of goods and...

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 economic slowdown of 2001 reduced productivity growth in both the United States and Canada. This development has raised the question of the sustainability or permanency of the pace of productivity growth experienced during the 1995-2000 period in the United States and the likelihood of...

After accelerating in the second half of the 1990s, aggregate labour productivity growth in Canada has fallen off significantly since 2000. This paper examines the factors behind this development, which is puzzling given the recent acceleration of productivity growth in the United States and the...

The third issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles that deal with a wide range of issues in the productivity area. Topics covered are the contribution of the information and communications technology sector to...

The fifth issue of the International Productivity Monitor published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the Canada-US manufacturing productivity gap; trends in Canadian living standards; the impact of economic reform on British productivity...

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....

The fourth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains five articles. Topics covered are: recent productivity developments in the United States and Canada and implications for the Canada-U.S. productivity and income gaps; the...