Competitiveness Challenges Facing Canadian Industries

Someshwar Rao and Jianmin Tang

Canadian Public Policy, 2004, vol. 30, issue 4, 365-380

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to evaluate the competitive position of Canadian industries vis-à-vis their American counterparts. Our results suggest that recent good economic news and a strong trade performance mask Canada's competitiveness difficulties. The export surge and a big increase in the trade surplus were largely the result of a strong US economy and a large real depreciation of the Canadian dollar vis-à-vis the US dollar, but were not due to any improvement in underlying competitiveness. As a matter of fact, Canada lost substantial ground to the United States in productivity, the fundamental determinant of the underlying competitiveness. Canada's relatively weak performance in terms of capital accumulation, innovation, highly skilled labour, greater importance of small-sized firms in the economy and a slower shift to New Economy industries all have contributed to its productivity and competitiveness difficulties.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0317-0861%2820041 ... CCFCI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-J (text/html)
only available to JSTOR 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:cpp:issued:v:30:y:2004:i:4:p:365-380

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.utpjournals.com/loi/cpp/

Access Statistics for this article

Canadian Public Policy is currently edited by Prof. Mike Veall

More articles in Canadian Public Policy from University of Toronto Press University of Toronto Press Journals Division 5201 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3H 5T8.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Iver Chong ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).