A Canadian Business Sector Data Base and New Estimates of Canadian TFP Growth

Walter Diewert and Emily Yu

Economics working papers from Vancouver School of Economics

Abstract: Using new data from Statistics Canada, the paper shows that the productivity performance of the business sector of the Canadian economy has been reasonably satisfactory over the past 51 years. In particular, traditional gross income Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth averaged 1.026 percentage points per year over the period 1961-2011. The focus of the study is on the real income generated by the business sector of the Canadian economy. The growth of quality adjusted labour input growth was the main driver of growth in real income followed by TFP growth, followed by growth in capital input and then by falling real import prices. However, in recent years, the contribution of falling real import prices turned out to be more than twice as important as capital deepening. The study encountered many data problems which should be addressed in future work on Canadian business sector productivity performance.

Keywords: Total Factor Productivity; Multifactor Productivity; real income; terms of trade effects; measurement of capital; measurement of inventory change; use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C43 C67 C82 D24 E22 E43 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 81 pages
Date: 2012-11-27, Revised 2012-11-27
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ubc:bricol:erwin_diewert-2012-29

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