An Analysis of the Causes of Weak Labour Productivity Growth in Canada since 2000
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since 2000, business sector labour productivity growth in Canada has averaged 0.95 per cent, 0.60 percentage points below the long-term trend established over the 1973-2000 period (1.55 per cent). In the United States productivity growth has continued to be robust beyond 2000, averaging 2.60 per cent per year. This article argues that Canada’s weak productivity growth since 2000 is temporary, and mostly associated with over-hiring and the adjustment costs of moving from a labour surplus to a labour shortage economy. The concentration of weak productivity growth since 2000 in the goods sector, the sector which shouldered the brunt of the structural adjustment, gives additional credence to this explanation. Moreover, most of the increased Canada-US productivity growth gap since 2000 relates to developments south of the 49th parallel. Given that the state of the factors driving productivity growth has not deteriorated in Canada relative to the United States in recent years, it is unlikely that long-term productivity growth in Canada and the United States have decoupled. Indeed, the current widening opens more room for convergence. Future productivity growth in Canada is likely to revert to its 1973-2000 trend. SINCE 2000, GROSS DOMESTIC product (GDP) growth in Canada and the United States has fol-lowed a similar path. Business sector GDP growth averaged 2.5 per cent per year between 2000 and 2007 in Canada compared to 2.6 per cent per year in the United States. The similarity in GDP growth, however, obscures the emer-gence of a 1.6 percentage point annual gap in labour productivity growth since 2000. Between 1973 and 2000, business sector labour productiv-ity, defined as output per hour worked, grew at similar rates in Canada and the United States, averaging 1.55 per cent and 1.71 per cent per year respectively, a 0.17 percentage point differ-ence. The growth rate difference widened signif-icantly in the post-2000 period, with labour productivity growth in the United States (2.60 per cent per year) more than two and a half times larger than in Canada (0.95 per cent per year). This article explores the possible causes of such a dismal productivity performance in Canada since
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it