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This paper describes how the analytical program of Statistics Canada's productivity group is used to enhance the quality (relevance, coherence, interpretability) of its products.

This paper discusses the productivity program at Statistics Canada, covering topics such as international efforts to provide more comparable statistics, attempts to expand our knowledge of the factors behind productivity growth, and challenges facing the program.

Publishes in-depth articles on labor subjects, current labor statistics, information about current labor contracts, and book reviews.

This document describes the sources, concepts and methods utilized by the Canadian Productivity Accounts and discusses how they compare with their U.S. counterparts.

The estimates of labour productivity (output per hour worked) that are produced by the Canadian Productivity Accounts are subject to 2 types of revisions. The 1st is a set of short-run revisions in gross domestic product (GDP) that take place over a four-year cycle as more and more data become available. The 2nd type of revision occurs less frequently, when major revisions are made in methodology or as a result of updates in concepts. This paper examines the revision cycle for labour productivity estimates over the period 2000-2003.

Uses data from the 1999 Annual Survey of Manufactures to examine how the productivity growth of manufacturing plants has been influenced by their proximity to cities, and by certain characteristics of these urban areas.

This study investigates the determinants of failure for new Canadian firms. It explores the role that certain factors play in conditioning the likehood of survival -- factors related to industry structure, firm demographics and macroeconomic cycles. It asks whether the determinants of failure are different for new start-ups than for firms that have reached adolescence, and if the magnitude of these differences is economically significant. It examines whether, after controlling for certain influences, failure rates differ across industries and provinces. Two themes figure prominently in this analysis. The first is the impact that certain industry characteristics -- such as average firm size and concentration -- have on the entry/exit process, either through their influence on failure costs or on the intensity of competition. The second centres on how the dimensions of failure evolve over time as new firms gain market experience.

This paper assesses the contribution that foreign-controlled plants make to the Canadian manufacturing sector by examining both whether foreign-controlled producers exhibit superior performance and whether their productivity growth spills over to domestic plants. In the first section, the performance of foreign-controlled plants is compared with domestic-controlled plants, using a variety of measures that include value added & gross output per worker, research & development, and technology used. The paper then asks whether foreign-controlled plants differ from those domestic producers that have foreign operations. The third section starts by measuring the contribution of foreign multinational enterprises to labour productivity growth in the Canadian manufacturing sector, then compares the importance of the contribution made by foreign-controlled plants to productivity growth in the 1990s to their contribution in the 1980s. At issue here is whether the relative importance of Canada as a destination for foreign direct investment declined during the 1990s as a result of two free trade agreements. Finally, the paper examines the following: whether productivity growth of domestic producers is higher when the market share of foreign producers is larger; the existence of a subset of domestic plants that benefits more from spillovers originating in foreign-controlled plants; and the presence of two mechanisms that generate spillovers: enhanced competition and the more intense use of advanced technologies by domestic firms.