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...

The skills issue is currently at or near the top of the federal government’s policy agenda, given its importance for harnessing the benefits of technological advances. Policy initiatives in the area should be premised on an accurate assessment of Canada’s recent experience in education and...

This eleventh issue of the International Productivity Monitor, published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards, contains seven articles on a range of topics: policies to improve productivity growth in Canada; the causes of lower information and communications technology investment in...

This tenth issue of the International Productivity Monitor produced by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains six articles. Topics covered are: the puzzling recent behaviour of labour productivity in Canada; an international perspective on Canada's productivity performance since the...

The productivity performance of the construction sector in Canada over the last quarter century has been dismal, with output per hour lower in 2000 than in 1977. In this article Andrew Sharpe from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards examines productivity trends in this sector and...

Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these...

Investing in disadvantaged young people is one of the rare public policies with no equity-efficiency tradeoff. This report estimates the potential benefit for the Canadian economy of increasing the educational attainment level of Aboriginal Canadians. We find that increasing the number of...

Investing in disadvantaged young people is one of the rare public policies with no equity-efficiency tradeoff. Based on the methodology developed in Sharpe, Arsenault and Lapointe (2007), we estimate the effect of increasing the educational attainment level of Aboriginal Canadians on labour...

THIS 18TH ISSUE OF THE International Productivity Monitor published by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards contains seven articles. Topics covered are the relationship between education, productivity and economic growth, new estimates of multifactor productivity for the Canadian...

In this chapter, Richard Harris points out that a traditional view has been that there is an inherent conflict between economic efficiency and social equality, a view neatly summarized in the title of Okun's famous book, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-off (1975). This view gained renewed...