Lars Osberg makes the case in his paper that the major success story of Canadian social policy in the twentieth century has in fact been the reduction of poverty among senior citizens. According to Osberg, the poverty rate, defined with the poverty line measured as one-half median equivalent...

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...

In this chapter, William Watson challenges Heath's interpretation of the benefits of productivity growth, but agrees with Richard Harris' views on the state of our knowledge about the potential contribution of social programs to productivity growth. Watson tackles Heath's assessment of the...

In this chapter, Miles Corak provides a useful overview of the state of knowledge on the issue of child poverty and most importantly reveals the complexity of the factors at play and the important gaps in our understanding of the underlying causes and effects. Corak finds that, except for those...

The paper by Charles M. Beach and Ross Finnie represents the first attempt to quantify short-term or cyclical changes in earnings mobility in Canada. Mobility analysis can be seen as a complement to the analysis of income distribution. For a given degree of earnings inequality, more earnings...

In this chapter, Andrew Heisz, Andrew Jackson and Garnet Picot provide an incisive and comprehensive analysis of the distributional changes that have occurred in Canada in the 1990s as well as useful comparative perspectives both in terms of trends over time and the particular patterns that can...

In this chapter, Tony Fisher and Doug Hostland provide an historical perspective on trends in labour productivity, labour income and living standards in Canada. They find that, once the appropriate adjustments are made, the labour share and the non-labour share (composed of profits, interest and...

Quebec’s relative growth performance with Ontario has always been an issue of concern for economic historians. In his paper Pierre Fortin discusses trends in Quebec’s real domestic income relative to that in Ontario over the last half-century. He finds that per capita real domestic income in...

The objectives of this report are to examine the characteristics of manufacturing in Atlantic Canada and to shed light on the factors behind the productivity gap between Atlantic Canada and Canada in the context of the manufacturing sector. A number of possible factors contributing to the...

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...