Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics Over the last 40 years, Canada and the United States have had quite similar performance in terms of productivity growth. These more or less similar rates of productivity growth have taken place despite differences in industry structure, trade orientation, and major social programs. However, in the 1990s, while productivity growth continued to be similar, the Canadian economy did significantly worse than the United States in terms of growth of GDP per capita. Much stronger employment growth in the United States is the most important reason for the deterioration in Canadian performance with regard to our standard of living. Cross-country comparisons of productivity are invariably difficult because of differences in methodology. Output and inputs are not always measured in the same way. Comparisons based on labor productivity are the most straightforward. Both statistics Canada and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics report a labor productivity measure for the business sector. In Canada, this calculation excludes a large portion of both health and education sectors; in the United States, it is primarily the public education sector that is excluded. Both countries use hours-worked as a measure of labor input. Comparison of the growth in labor productivity in Canada and the United States from growth, united, states, productivity, canada, economic, labor, economy, 2001, trade, recession, performance, gdp, canadian, unemployment, sectors, per, negative, capita, years, world, similar, rising, real, rate, output, nearly, natural, manufacturing, major, less, high, during, both