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This paper starts from the definition that "structural unemployment occurs when workers are unable to fill available jobs because they lack the skills, do not live where jobs are available, or are unwilling to work at the wage rate offered in the market." This implies that the number of vacancies in the Canadian labour market is an upper bound to the extent of "structural unemployment". The paper summarizes available estimates of the vacancy rate in Canada. In the high technology sector, vacancies may be equivalent to 2.2% of the labour force but evidence from more representative surveys indicates a range of 0.43% to 0.75% for the economy as a whole. Although during the 1980s the outward shift in the relationship between the Help-Wanted Index and the unemployment rate raised concerns that structural unemployment was an increasing problem in Canada, that shift has been reversed in the 1990s.

North American transportation in figures provides a comprehensive set of comparable statistical indicators of the use, performance and impact of transportation in North America. It includes over 90 different data tables, supported by figures, maps and extensive technical documentation describing data categories and definitions relating to each country, that is, Canada, Mexico and the United States. The report covers a wide variety of transportation subjects across the three countries: including transportation and the economy; safety; merchandise trade; freight activity; passenger travel; infrastructure; and transportation energy and environment.

The Guide to health statistics leads to health-related information with links to vital statistics such as births, deaths, marriages and divorces, to cancer statistics, health determinants, health status, health care, smoking and tobacco use and more. There is also information on cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys from the Canadian Community Health Survey and the National Population Health Survey.

This user's guide has been developed by Health Statistics Division to facilitate access on health information at Statistics Canada. It includes information with links to products and programs from Health Statistics Division, other divisions at Statistics Canada and other health related programs outside Statistics Canada.

The first survey of innovation, advanced technologies and practices in the Canadian construction sector was recently conducted. Of the five types of technologies listed in the survey, communications technologies have the highest percentage of use (46% of businesses). Of all the techonolgies, three computer-related technologies had the highest percentage of use : e-mail (38%), company computer networks (25%) and computer aided design (23%). The three advanced practices with the largest percentage of business using them, each with one third of businesses, are: design-build contracts, computerized inventory control and computerized estimating software.

The growing trend towards a knowledge-based economy has impacted the way research is funded and performed in Canadian universities. As higher quality estimates of R&D activities by this sector are of increasing importance to policy makers, Statistics Canada has begun substantial revisions to the methods for calculating estimates for higher education R&D. The implementation of this plan will provide substantially improved estimates of both dollar values and personnel counts for this sector.

Although universities and federal government departments have unique mandates, both are striving to promote applied research. Recent surveys finally provide a basis for comparison. In 1999, universities reported over 1,800 active patents with royalties approaching $19 million. Federal governments departments had almost 2,000 patents generating $12 million in royalties.

Why do innovation surveys produce radically different estimates of the number of R&D performers than R&D surveys? The factors contributing to divergence are presented with detail on selected contributors.

Given the high cost of R&D, adopting the correct strategies and mix of products is required for success for Canadian biotechnology firms. A recent survey examined the rapid growth of 30 companies. Fast-growing enterprises adopted a strategy of patenting their products, avoiding major production delays, targeting export markets, accessing venture capital, conducting key alliances, and planning the IPO.

Technological change and innovations depend greatly on R&D activities and investments. R&D is concentrated around the "core firms" that are responsible for 87% of expenditures. Biotechnology R&D performers accounted for $904 million of R&D expenditure. Biotechnology R&D is concentrated in large firms with 75% of R&D occuring in firms with 100 or more employees. Almost 77% of funding sources for R&D in biotechnology came from the private sector and 21% from foreign sources.

In the private sector, 10.1% of enterprises use the Internet to sell goods and services. The information and cultural industries utilize this growing form of commerce the greatest (20.1%). In comparison, 14.5% of public sector institutions sell goods or services with educational services leading the way, followed by federal and provincial governments.

This publication presents information on the income, expenditure and assets of all trusteed pension funds in Canada in both the public and private sectors. Data are presented at the Canada level. The publication contains an analysis of the funds based on the size of the fund, the number of members and the type of benefit. It is a continuation of a series of reports produced since 1957. As a single pool of investment capital in Canada, these funds are surpassed in size only by the aggregate reserves held by the chartered banks.

Often identified as an emerging sector, the environment industry continues to evolve into a complex industry that offers a wide range of technologies and services aimed at protecting the environment and improving environmental quality. This paper analyses Canada's trade in environmental goods and services and compares it with the trade profile of the world's largest environmental market, the United States. What is Canada's trade balance among the different segments of the environment industry? What are the market drivers for environmental goods and services? The relevance of this research is magnified by the current focus on environmental technologies and their key sub-sectors such as climate change technologies, water and wastewater systems and hazardous waste management. The government recently identified these sectors as targeted growth areas for Canada.

The ports handled a total of 274.3 million tonnes (Mt.) of cargo. Strong increases in domestic shipments, particularly in the forest sector were sufficient to offset a decline in international shipments, which were strongly affected by a decrease in iron ore shipments to US ports.

For the Canadian bus industry as a whole, the first six months of 1999 produced marginal financial improvements over the same months of the previous year. Gross revenues excluding subsidies grew by just over one half of one percent, rising from $1.58 billion in 1998 to $1.59 billion in 1999. Expenditures decreased slightly from $2.38 billion for the first two quarters of 1998 to $2.37 billion in 1999.

This online publication presents detailed annual financial and operating statistics on the Canadian cable television industry. Operational data are published on subscribers, households passed by cable, kilometres of cable, channel capacity and program hours. Financial statistics include detailed revenue and expense accounts, balance sheet and statement of retained earnings. The preamble to the publication consists of statistical highlights, a written analysis and text tables which display a financial and operating summary of the cable television industry. Also included is a glossary of terms for the industry.

This publication analyses interprovincial and international trade flows with provincial highlights enhanced by charts, contains tables that illustrate: how trade has evolved annually from 1992 to 1998; the types of goods and services traded; and, developments of economic linkages among the provinces.

Nearly 50,000 or one in five (22%) Canadian truck drivers on the road in 1998 were independent truckers or "owner-operators". However, similar to other forms of self-employment, the net-earnings and socio-economic characteristics of owner-operators have often been ignored by researchers for reasons of analytical convenience or data limitations. New data products recently released by Statistics Canada such as the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) have the potential to fill much of this gap. The 1997 SLID cross-sectional micro-data files offer a limited but meaningful insight into the work patterns of the owner-operator population, complementing and validating well-established business surveys such as the annual Small for-hire carrier and Owner-operator Survey (SFO). The purpose of this study, through a multivariate analysis of the 1997 SLID and the 1997 SFO survey, was to compare the work patterns and backgrounds of owner-operators to company drivers (paid truck drivers employed by carriers). The study found that while drivers may choose to be self-employed to gain independence, owner-operators tend to work longer hours to meet fixed and variable costs, in return for lower after-tax earnings and a greater likelihood of high work-life stress. The analysis also found that the odds of self-employment among truckers were highest among drivers over 40 years of age with no post-secondary training.

Statistics on hotels, motels, tourist camping grounds and other types of traveller accommodation (e.g., receipts, employment, expenses, occupancy) are provided in this publication. Also included are definitions, methodology, and notes on data quality.

Sub-provincial employment dynamics uses longitudinal data to produce year-to-year changes in the number of employer businesses, employment and payrolls in Canada. Changes are shown by size of business and by business life status, which includes entry, exit, growth and decline.

Censuses of Canada, 1665 to 1871, Statistics of Canada, Volume IV was printed in Ottawa, in 1876, from the Censuses of Canada, 1870-71. This volume contains about 343 statistical tables on the social and economic conditions in Canada from the earliest settlements to Confederation and onto 1871. The results from 98 censuses are arranged in chronological order, with some explanatory notes. In most cases, there are sufficient descriptions of the individual series to enable the reader to use them without consulting the numerous basic sources referenced in the publication.

An electronic version of this historical publication is accessible on the Internet site of Statistics Canada. The Introduction is a free downloadable document in text as HTML pages for on-line viewing and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files for printing. The statistical tables are available through E-STAT* (which allows both on-line viewing and downloading).

The primary purpose of this article is to present a new time series data and to demonstrate its analytical potential and not to provide a detailed analysis of these data. The analysis in section 5.2.4 will deal primarily with the trends of major variables dealing with domestic and transborder traffic.

This article focusses on children who receive special education because of a physical, emotional, behavioural or other problem. It uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores children's academic achievement, behaviour, classroom environment and other school-related experiences, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores the role of parents in the learning environment of children aged 6 to 11 years, using results from the first cycle of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores the effects of early childhood education and care programs on school performance and experiences.

This paper examines how several factors contribute to innovative activity in the Canadian manufacturing sector. First, it investigates the extent to which intellectual property right protection stimulates innovation. Second, it examines the contribution that R&D makes to innovation. Third, it considers the importance of various competencies in the area of marketing, human resource, technology and production to the innovation process. Fourth, it examines the extent to which a larger firm size and less competition serve to stimulate competition-the so-called Schumpeterian hypothesis. Fifth, the effect of the nationality of a firm on innovation is also investigated. Finally, the paper examines the effect of an industry's environment on a firm's ability to innovate.

Several findings are of note. First, the relationship between innovation and patent use is found to be much stronger going from innovation to patent use than from patent use to innovation. Firms that innovate take out patents; but firms and industries that make more intensive use of patents do not tend to produce more innovations. Second, while R&D is important, developing capabilities in other areas, such as technological competency and marketing, is also important. Third, size effects are significant. The largest firms tend to be more innovative. As for competition, intermediate levels of competition are the most conducive to innovation. Fourth, foreign-controlled firms are not significantly more likely to innovate than domestic-controlled firms once differences in competencies have been taken into account. Fifth, the scientific infrastructure provided by university research is a significant determinant of innovation.

This paper revisits trends in the level and distribution of income among Canadian seniors in the context of what is arguably the major source of change in these trends since the end of the seventies, the maturation of Canada's public and private earnings-related pension systems. The expanded role of earnings-related pensions in the 1980s and 1990s is largely the result of changes that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. The Canada and Quebec Pension Plans (C/QPP) were implemented in 1966 and the first cohort to receive full C/QPP benefits turned 65 in 1976. Cohorts retiring after this period were also the beneficiaries of the expansion of private occupational pensions that took place between the 1950s and the 1970s. The author relies on a detailed decomposition of income by source to show that not only did the maturation of these earnings-related programs produce a substantial increase in average real incomes but also to a substantial reduction in income inequality among the elderly, due mainly to C/QPP benefits. Rising real incomes went disproportionately to lower income seniors contributing to the well-known decline in low-income rates among the elderly.

The current economic context obliges all partners of health-care systems, whether public or private, to identify those factors that determine the use of health-care services. To increase our understanding of the phenomena that underlie these relationships, Statistics Canada and the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation have established a new database. For a representative sample of the province of Manitoba, cross-sectional micro-data on the level of health of individuals and on their socioeconomic characteristics, and detailed longitudinal data on the use of health-care services have been linked. In this presentation, we will discuss the general context of the linkage of records from various organizations, the protection of privacy and confidentiality. We will also present results of studies which should not have been performed in the absence of the linked database.

A meta analysis was performed to estimate the proportion of liver carcinogens, the proportion of chemicals carcinogenic at any site, and the corresponding proportion of anticarcinogens among chemicals tested in 397 long-term cancer bioassays conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program. Although the estimator used was negatively biased, the study provided persuasive evidence for a larger proportion of liver carcinogens (0.43,90%CI: 0.35,0.51) than was identified by the NTP (0.28). A larger proportion of chemicals carcinogenic at any site was also estimated (0.59,90%CI: 0.49,0.69) than was identified by the NTP (0.51), although this excess was not statistically significant. A larger proportion of anticarcinogens (0.66) was estimated than carcinogens (0.59). Despite the negative bias, it was estimated that 85% of the chemicals were either carcinogenic or anticarcinogenic at some site in some sex-species group. This suggests that most chemicals tested at high enough doses will cause some sort of perturbation in tumor rates.

In this Issue is a column where the Editor biefly presents each paper of the current issue of Survey Methodology. As well, it sometimes contain informations on structure or management changes in the journal.

Often, the same information is gathered almost simultaneously for several different surveys. In France, this practice is institutionalized for household surveys that have a common set of demographic variables, i.e., employment, residence and income. These variables are important co-factors for the variables of interest in each survey, and if used carefully, can reinforce the estimates derived from each survey. Techniques for calibrating uncertain data can apply naturally in this context. This involves finding the best unbiased estimator in common variables and calibrating each survey based on that estimator. The estimator thus obtained in each survey is always a linear estimator, the weightings of which can be easily explained and the variance can be obtained with no new problems, as can the variance estimate. To supplement the list of regression estimators, this technique can also be seen as a ridge-regression estimator, or as a Bayesian-regression estimator.

The U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey uses two instruments, a diary and an in-person interview, to collect data on many categories of consumer expenditures. Consequently, it is important to use these data efficiently to estimate mean expenditures and related parameters. Three options are: (1) use only data from the diary source; (2) Use only data from the interview source; and (3) use generalized least squares, or related methods, to combine the diary and interview data. Historically, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has focused on options (1) and (2) for estimation at the five or six-digit Universal Classification Code level. Evaluation and possible implementation of option (3) depends on several factors, including possible measurement biases in the diary and interview data; the empirical magnitude of these biases, relative to the standard errors of customary mean estimators; and the degree of homogeneity of these biases across strata and periods. This paper reviews some issues related to options (1) through (3); describes a relatively simple generalized least squares method for implementation of option (3); and discussed the need for diagnostics to evaluate the feasibility and relative efficiency of the generalized least squares method.

The geographical and temporal relationship between outdoor air pollution and asthma was examined by linking together data from multiple sources. These included the administrative records of 59 general practices widely dispersed across England and Wales for half a million patients and all their consultations for asthma, supplemented by a socio-economic interview survey. Postcode enabled linkage with: (i) computed local road density; (ii) emission estimates of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides, (iii) measured/interpolated concentration of black smoke, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants at practice level. Parallel Poisson time series analysis took into account between-practice variations to examine daily correlations in practices close to air quality monitoring stations. Preliminary analyses show small and generally non-significant geographical associations between consultation rates and pollution markers. The methodological issues relevant to combining such data, and the interpretation of these results will be discussed.

The artificial sample was generated in two steps. The first step, based on a master panel, was a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) carried out on basic variables. Then, "dummy" individuals were generated randomly using the distribution of each "significant" factor in the analysis. Finally, for each individual, a value was generated for each basic variable most closely linked to one of the previous factors. This method ensured that sets of variables were drawn independently. The second step consisted in grafting some other data bases, based on certain property requirements. A variable was generated to be added on the basis of its estimated distribution, using a generalized linear model for common variables and those already added. The same procedure was then used to graft the other samples. This method was applied to the generation of an artificial sample taken from two surveys. The artificial sample that was generated was validated using sample comparison testing. The results were positive, demonstrating the feasibility of this method.

Electricity rates that vary by time-of-day have the potential to significantly increase economic efficiency in the energy market. A number of utilities have undertaken economic studies of time-of-use rates schemes for their residential customers. This paper uses meta-analysis to examine the impact of time-of-use rates on electricity demand pooling the results of thirty-eight separate programs. There are four key findings. First, very large peak to off-peak price ratios are needed to significantly affect peak demand. Second, summer peak rates are relatively effective compared to winter peak rates. Third, permanent time-or-use rates are relatively effective compared to experimental ones. Fourth, demand charges rival ordinary time-of-use rates in terms of impact.

We use data on 14 populations of coho salmon to estimate critical parameters that are vital for management of fish populations. Parameter estimates from individual data sets are inefficient and can be highly biased, and we investigate methods to overcome these problems. Combination of data sets using nonlinear mixed effects models provides more useful results, however questions of influence and robustness are raised. For comparison, robust estimates are obtained. Model-robustness is also explored using a family of alternative functional forms. Our results allow ready calculation of the limits of exploitation and may help to prevent extinction of fish stocks. Similar methods can be applied in other contexts where parameter estimation is part of a larger decision-making process.

This user's guide provides a detailed description of the CD-ROM Income trends in Canada (13F0022XCB). It also provides a glossary, a description of the major concepts as well as an overview of the data source, the Survey of Consumer Finances.

This paper outlines the process of delineating the agricultural land base (ecumene) in Canada based on data from the 1991 Census of Agriculture.

This paper reconstructs the development and evolution of the Canadian agricultural statistical system. It describes the expanding and increasingly important role of administrative data, which is integrated into survey and census information in order to complement, supplement or replace survey information or to assist with frame maintenance.

This paper describes the experiences, the issues and the expectations of the many different players involved in the implementation of document imaging for the Canadian Census of Agriculture.