Growth of Advanced Technology Use in Canadian Manufacturing During the 1990's

This paper outlines the growth in advanced technology use that has taken place over the last decade in Canadian manufacturing establishments. It presents the percentage of plants that use any one of the advanced technologies studied and how this has changed between 1989 and 1998. It also investigates how growth rates in the 1990s have varied across different technologies in specific functional areas, such as design and engineering, fabrication, communications, and integration and control. In an attempt to discover how changes in technology use are related to certain plant characteristics, the paper then investigates whether the growth in technology use varies across plants that differ by size, nationality and industry. Multivariate analysis is used to investigate the joint effects of plant size, foreign ownership and industry on the incidence of technology adoption and how these effects have changed over the last decade.