Category Productivity
It’s time to start worrying about productivity again
There were a couple of nice papers in the Centre for the Study of Living Standards' spring 2008 issue of their International Productivity Monitor. The reason we keep coming back to this issue is summarised in this chart from Business Sector Productivity in Canada: What Do We Know? (pdf), by Paul Boothe and Richard Roy […]
Worrying demographic fact o’ the day
From an article in the Bank of Canada Review (14-page pdf): Since 1980, the growth in labour input has accounted for just over half of the growth of real gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada. Most of this rise in labour input can be attributed to increases in the size of the working-age population and […]
Connecting profits and investment
Paul Krugman’s column on the apparent disconnect between high profits and low investment (as ever, the indispensable Mark Thoma provides the reference) has a bit of déjà vu for Canadian readers: haven’t we seen this before? But more fundamentally, I don’t see why we should expect that there should be a stable relationship between current […]
Real wages and productivity revisited
Andrew Jackson says: I’ve argued for years, with much of the left, that average worker pay has lagged productivity growth mainly because of the increased bargaining power of capital vis a vis labour due to “globalization”, attacks on unions etc etc. There’s another explanation. It turns out that the way real wages are measured – […]
Another productivity slowdown
Although employment growth continued to be respectable through 2006, output growth slowed – signifying yet another reduction in productivity growth: Statscan’s Philip Cross tries to figure out why (22-page pdf), paying special attention to sectoral and regional factors: Last year’s drop in mining productivity was part of a long-term downward trend. The declining productivity of […]
Low productivity growth is a problem. Subsidising R&D isn’t the solution
One of the ideas floating around in the wake of the federal govt’s economic update is the notion that more should be done to promote research and development in Canada. The usual way of promoting this project is to play up the link between R&D, technical progress and productivity: if the payoff from subsidising R&D […]
Welfare states can be competitive
Jim Stanford sets aside our shared scepticism about the WEF competitiveness rankings to make two points in his column in today’s Globe and Mail: Get real about Canadian competitiveness: Nine of the 15 countries ahead of us on the WEF list collect higher taxes than Canada. Indeed, the Scandinavian welfare states cleaned up this year: […]
Real wages and the terms of trade: Productivity growth is little help if you’re making stuff no-one wants to buy
To resume from where we left off last time, if you deflate nominal US nonfarm business sector compensation by the NFB deflator, you get a real compensation series that tracks productivity pretty well. But if you deflate it by the CPI, real buying power has lagged well behind productivity since the mid-70’s: Although the standard […]
Useless factoid of the day: Canada is 16th on the WEF competitiveness report
I’ve spent half an hour on the WEF site, and I can’t for the life of me figure out what they’re measuring. Or why it matters.
Productivity growth by creative destruction
From a Statistics Canada study on competition, firm turnover and productivity growth: The competitive process that shifts market share towards more productive firms accounted for about two thirds of aggregate labour productivity growth in Canadian manufacturing from 1989 to 1999, according to a new study that examines firm turnover and productivity growth. [emphasis mine] Here […]
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