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Essays of Canadian productivity and international trade

University of British Columbia

This thesis is a collection of three empirical papers that made use of recent Canadian trade and production data. The first chapter “Productivity Performance of Canada" examines Canada's productivity and changes in terms of trade 1961-2007. These changes have been mostly favourable and have had the same effect on real income growth as Total Factor Productivity improvements of the business sector of the economy. The framework applied is developed by Diewert, Kohli and Morrison and is based on production theory. We utilised published and unpublished data from the Statistics Canada Multifactor Productivity program, which develops “bottom up" estimates of business sector productivity from industry estimates. However, we use in this chapter a “top down" approach which utilises (adjusted) final demand data to form a business sector output aggregate and thus leads to much higher estimates of TFP growth for Canada than the corresponding Statistics Canada estimates. Finally, the new export and import time series are used to determine the contributions to real income growth of changes in these disaggregated export and import prices over the 47 year period. The second chapter “Business Sector Data on Outputs and Inputs for Canada 1961-2007" details the business sector data used in the first chapter and explains the construction of estimates of Canadian final demand expenditures, business sector labour input, business sector capital stock, primary input tax rates, balancing real rates of return and user costs. We also make some recommendations for possible improvements that Statistics Canada could make to its productivity program. The third chapter “Does Lobbying Affect Antidumping Case Determinations in Canada?" examines whether the mandate of antidumping legislation in Canada was independent of influences other than those allowed. The relation between antidumping case determinations and various determinants is examined, in particular, whether lobbying activities can influence case determinations. Unlike previous studies that constructed political variable with data that have limited information on policy influence targets, this chapter constructs the variable using the Canadian Lobbyists Registration data with detailed information on lobbyists who had indicated they lobbied for administered protection. The current empirical evidence suggests that the antidumping mandate is not apolitical.

Text

2010-04-19

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/23807

Economics

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/