Other surveys can be found in Boothe and Roy (2008), Crawford (2002), Dion and Fay (2008).

For a more extensive discussion of the issues in this section, see Statistics Canada (2007b).

The business sector is the total economy, excluding non-commercial activities and the owner-occupied proportion of residential housing.

See also Baldwin, Durand and Hosein (2001) for a study on the extent to which productivity growth at the industry level is passed on to product prices.

Sharpe, Arsenault and Harrison (2008) provide a number of explanations for this divergence including the declining bargaining power of workers, as well as increases in capital consumption as a result of increased investment in information and communication technologies equipment with a higher depreciation.

See OECD (2001).

See Gu et al. (2003).

For a discussion of the growth accounting framework used to generate this formula, see Baldwin and Gu (2007b).

See Statistics Canada (2007c).

See Baldwin, Gaudreault and Harchaoui (2001) for an estimate of the contribution that economies of scale make to productivity estimates.

CANSIM table 380-0016.

General surveys of U.S. productivity growth can be found in Bureau of Labor Statistics 1983, Jorgenson, Ho and Stiroh 2005, and Triplett and Bosworth 2004.

For additional details, see Gu et al. 2003.

The data for Canada are taken from CANSIM table 383-0021. The data for the United States are obtained from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are not entirely comparable. Labour productivity is defined as ‘output per hours worked’ for Canada and it is defined as ‘output per unit of employment’ for the United States. Other differences relate to valuation of output, which is valued at basic prices for Canada and at market prices for the United States. It should also be noted that part of the difference between the two countries may stem from different price deflators being used in the two countries. The United States makes greater use of hedonics to capture increases in quality of product, which can result in higher growth in the volume of goods and services produced.

Baldwin et al. (2005), Maynard (2007c), Baldwin, Gu and Yan, (2008).

See Baldwin et al. (2005) and Maynard (2007c).

Ongoing work is being undertaken to put the estimates of investment on the same basis. Canada places more of the total expenditures made on machinery and equipment per year into the investment, as opposed to the repairs category, than does the United States. Future work on MFP comparisons will be directed at this area.

Canada also has estimates of expected length of life that it uses to confirm the estimates it derives from used asset price data. See Statistics Canada (2007b).

These results apply to all asset types in both 1997 and current dollars.

This trend has been occurring for a long time. Baldwin and Gorecki (1986) report that in the manufacturing sector, the Canada/U.S. ratio of machinery and equipment was relatively stable between 1961 and 1979, but structures and engineering increased in relative terms.

The relative MFP level in Table 3 includes the relative labour composition differences between Canada and the United States since labour input in the table is measured by hours worked and does not take into account the effect of changes in labour composition. To be consistent with the level comparisons, we have added the labour composition effect to the MFP growth in Chart 15 and use these gross MFP growth differences to project the MFP levels differences over time.

Note that cross-country comparisons for the total economy will therefore be affected by the relative size of the non-business sector in each country.

For further discussion of this issue, see Macdonald (2007).