Of the three major age groups, youth (aged 15-24), experienced the largest fall in labour force participation and accounted for the lion’s share of the aggregate decline. Consequently, an understanding of the factors behind this development is essential to an overall understanding of the fall...

Labour force participation rates vary greatly by age, with persons 55 and over having much lower participation rates than younger persons. Consequently, changes in the demographic composition of the population can exert a long-run effect on aggregate participation rates. In the third article of...

In contrast to the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s, the aggregate participation rate in the United States actually rose slightly (up 0.5 percentage points between 1989 and 1997). This US experience provides a useful benchmark for the analysis of the Canadian...

The participation rate of women aged 25-64 rose greatly in the 1970s and 1980s, but has stagnated in the 1990s. In principle, this development could reflect either the poor growth performance of the economy this decade or the completion of the integration of women into the labour force. In the...

Cyclical, policy changes, and structural factors have been put forward to explain the decline in labour force participation in Canada in the 1990s. In the first article in the symposium, Pierre Fortin and Mario Fortin attempt to determine the relative importance of these three types of factors...

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 1990s was a long decade in Canada. It was a period of transitions and turbulence, of seismic shifts in the Canadian economy and dramatic changes in many longstanding public programs. It was also a decade in which Canadians' attitudes toward their economic future and their expectations of...

Festschrift literally means “celebration-writing” in German. And that is what this volume is. It celebrates the remarkable career of David Slater, which in the best Queen’s University tradition of John Deutsch and Clifford Clark spanned academia and public service, on the occasion of his...

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...