In this chapter, Lars Osberg and Andrew Sharpe provide an overview of trends in a number of dimensions of economic well-being (consumption flows, stocks of wealth, income equality, and economic security) from the lens of the Index of Economic Well-being, a new composite measure of economic...

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...

In this chapter, Jim Stanford agrees that measures were needed to eliminate the deficit. But he argues that Paul Martin's program spending cuts were larger than necessary and caused real pain in many areas of Canadian life. He shows that a strategy in which program spending was frozen in nominal...

This is a review article by Andrew Sharpe from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards of Angus Maddison's path-breaking new book, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. The article summarizes Maddison's key findings in a number of areas, with particular emphasis on his estimates of...

In this chapter, Graves and Jenkins explore the attitudes of Canadians to productivity. The distinction between our standard of living and our quality of life is a powerful one for Canadians generally. The economic citizen who emerges from Graves and Jenkins data is relatively aware of the terms...

This paper develops an Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB) for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 which recognizes four components: Current effective per capita consumption flows; Net societal accumulation of stocks of...

This report’s objective is the construction of an index of labour market well-being that is capable of measuring the well-being that individuals in a given society at a given point in time can obtain through the labour market. Besides considering simply the average return from working, workers...