The Contribution of Changing Energy and Import Prices to Changing Average Labor Productivity: A Profit Formulation for Canada

Dean C. Mountain

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1985, vol. 100, issue 3, 651-675

Abstract: In the 1970s there has been a noticeable labor productivity slowdown in Canada. In addition to contributions of such traditional variables as changes in capital intensity and quality of labor, this study quantifies contributions of higher energy and changing import prices to productivity changes. A Taylor series approximation to a restricted profit function representing the Canadian economy helps reveal that rising energy prices have reduced labor productivity by 0.53 percent per year after 1970 and that the underlying modified rates of technical progress in the 1960s and 1970s, having netted out price of energy—and import—effects, are not dissimilar.

Date: 1985
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/1884373 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:100:y:1985:i:3:p:651-675.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().