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Statistics Canada's approach to gathering and disseminating economic data has developed over several decades into a highly integrated system for collection and estimation that feeds the framework of the Canadian System of National Accounts. The key to this approach was creation of the Unified Enterprise Survey, the goal of which was to improve the consistency, coherence, breadth and depth of business survey data. The UES did so by bringing many of Statistics Canada's individual annual business surveys under a common framework. This framework included a single survey frame, a sample design framework, conceptual harmonization of survey content, means of using relevant administrative data, common data collection, processing and analysis tools, and a common data warehouse.

This paper examines the pattern of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per unit of output (or eco-efficency) between 1990 and 1996, decomposing the changes into an energy-intensity effect, an energy-mix effect and a carbon-content effect. Our contribution to this paper constitutes a case study of the relative importance of these factors for a country on the downward-sloping portion of its CO2 emission-output trajectories. Overall, our results indicate that the combination of energy intensity and substitution effects contributed to the decline in CO2 emissions per unit of output. While the substitution effect was emissions-reducing, it was not by itself sufficient enough to generate a major downward-sloping emission-output trajectory. Reductions in energy intensity typically played a substantially larger role in decreasing emissions than did the substitution effect. The carbon-content effect made a positive, albeit small, contribution to the growth of CO2 emissions per unit of output.

This paper investigates the evolution of industrial structure in the Canadian food processing sector and its relationship to technological change. It does so by examining the impact on plant performance of adopting advanced manufacturing technologies, among them information & communication technologies. The study utilizes a linked dataset combining advanced technology-use data from a 1998 special survey with firm performance data derived from administrative records covering 1988-97. The data file contains information on advanced technology-use, plant characteristics, and plant performance. The paper first examines the characteristics of firms that adopt advanced technologies. It also enumerates the extent to which plants replace one another by transferring market share and the extent to which this has been accompanied by changes in relative productivity & profitability. It then studies the effect of technological choices on plant performance, using measures such as growth in productivity and market share, and examines the relationship between the use of advanced manufacturing technology (such as programmable controllers, aseptic processing, and computer networks) and those two measures of plant performance.