A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s has been the decline in labour force participation. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium of articles that explore this issue. The idea for this symposium came out of a December 1997 workshop on labour...

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...

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...

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...

Canada's labour productivity performance has been abysmal since 2000, both relative to our historical experience and to that in the United States. In theory, a deterioration of the health status of Canadian workers could explain slower productivity growth. However, the evidence does not support...

This report presents new estimates of the levels and growth rates of labour, capital and multifactor productivity for the Canadian provinces by industry for the 1997-2007 period at the market sector, two-digit, and three-digit NAICS industry levels. Also, estimates of the sources of labour...

This report presents a framework for decomposing aggregate productivity growth into within-sector effects and sectoral reallocation effects. This framework is used to analyze productivity growth in 12 Canadian industries for the 1961-2007 period and for several subperiods. The results do not...

This report provides an assessment of human capital development in British Columbia. The province's performance is above average according to the majority of the indicators we analyze, relative to both the rest of Canada and other OECD countries. However, this does not mean that there is no room...