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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.

The publication provides principal statistics of the logging industry including number of establishments, number of employees, salaries and wages, cost of fuel and electricity, cost of materials, value of shipments and value added. It also presents commodity detail by province on inputs and outputs and estimates of total forest production, by products and by province. A data analysis, definitions and notes, a bibliography and a list of establishments by province are also included.

Montreal-Toronto was the top domestic market in 1998 for passengers on scheduled flights, followed by the Toronto-Vancouver market. Toronto-Vancouver was the top market for passengers on charter flights, followed by the Montreal-Toronto market.

Text Table 2.1 shows the change in the relationship between passenger counts and population for the ten most-frequented Canadian cities over the years 1973, 1993 and 1998.

Text Table 3.1 shows the relationship between passengers and population for each province and territory. In this table, passengers are assigned to each province/territory based on the ticket origin.

In this paper, the proportion of passengers flying within Canada that reach their destination on a direct flight is measured in order to assess the service that is offered by the carriers.

This on-line publication presents statistics and analysis on the volume of domestic air passenger traffic generated at Canadian cities and carried between pairs of Canadian points. The data may be used to indicate the relative community of interest between Canadian cities.

Revenues of private television broadcasters reached $1,862.9 in 1999, an increase of 2.2% from 1998. This increase is modest when compared to the two previous years where revenues grew 7.0% and 6.3% respectively. There was very little change in the relative importance of sources of revenues; the sale of air time accounted for 94.1% of revenues compared to 94.6% a year earlier.

To provide data users with a more complete picture of the activies associated with the Couriers and Local Messengers industry.

Revenues of private radio broadcasters reached $971.9 million in 1999, an increase of 3.2% from 1998. This increase is modest when compared to the two previous years where revenues rose 8.1% and 7.5% respectively.

Data on furniture and fixture industries clearly show the tremendous expansion period affecting these industries. Several establishments have taken advantage of the favourable economic conditions and the openness of North American markets to increase their deliveries to the United States. Foreign markets have been the driving force behind the furniture and fixture industries' growth in the past decade, since large establishments generally have more resources to break into these markets.

This paper looks at the number of business establishment starts in smaller and larger communities in Canada from 1993 to 1996.

In just over a decade, the cellular telephone industry has grown to close to one fifth the size of the traditional teletphone segment of the industry, experiencing an annual revenue growth rate between 22% and 29%. By December 1997, there were just over 4 million cellular telephone subscribers in Canada - a 22% increase over the previous year - more than double the level of subscribers in 1994.

In a recent Statistics Canada survey, 77% of Canadian plant managers felt their production technology was as good as their domestic competitors. Against their U.S. counterparts, they were less confident: only 57% of Canadian firms believed their technologies were as good as their American competitors. The survey also reveals that 70% firms used the Internet and 60% had a "home page" on the World Wide Web.

In 1996, larger financial services companies were the most likely to use the Internet for communications, research and e-commerce. During that year, 73% of banks were using the Internet whereas less than half of the property and casualty insurance companies were connected. E-commerce was undertaken by only 17% of the connected firms whereas 70% was using e-mail and 86% was conducting web searches. Internet users were more innovative and introduced more new products than non-users.

In 1999, the federal government expects to fund 19.4% of the R&D in Canada. Less and less of the government-funded R&D is taking place in government labs. Although overall spending on R&D will increase from $3.5 billion to $4.0 billion, the share of this going to the government research has dropped from 59% to 52%.

You thought it was obvious but the ICT sector that everyone is talking about hasn't had an official definition - until now. We sorted through the SIC (1980) codes and selected 20 that fit. Next issue - the NAICS-based definitions.

Our jobs, communities, leisure activities and patterns of commerce are changing at a dizzying pace - the Internet is literally transforming the way we live, work and play. In 1998, 36% of Canadian households were regular users of computer communication - up sharply from 29% in 1997. And the technology revolution is not over yet!

Gross domestic product expenditures on R&D (GERD) for 1999 increased by 3.5% to $14.9 billion over the previous year. Despite this increase, the proportion of GDP devoted to R&D (1.6%) is still among the lowest of the G-7 countries.

A Statistics Canada study uses business demographics to learn about innovation and technological change and uncovers interesting patterns. Contrary to expectations, the author uncovered considerable volatility (start-ups and closures) in the service sector. The volatility rate for this sector was 31% compared with 23% for the manufacturing sector. Firms that do not innovate frequently are replaced by new ones that have new or improved products to offer or by those that employ more efficient methods of production and delivery.

Some analysts suggest that biotechnology may trigger a revolution equal to the one prompted by information technology. Various sectors of Canadian industry are already actively using biotechnologies for purposes ranging from research and development to pollution control. Many still see obstacles to adopting new biotechnologies including lack of information and government regulation.

Much work on probabilistic methods of linkage can be found in the statistical literature. However, although many groups undoubtedly still use deterministic procedures, not much literature is available on these strategies. Furthermore there appears to exist no documentation on the comparison of results for the two strategies. Such a comparison is pertinent in the situation where we have only non-unique identifiers like names, sex, race etc. as common identifiers on which the databases are to be linked. In this work we compare a stepwise deterministic linkage strategy with the probabilistic strategy, as implemented in AUTOMATCH, for such a situation. The comparison was carried out on a linkage between medical records from the Regional Perinatal Intensive Care Centers database and education records from the Florida Department of Education. Social security numbers, available in both databases, were used to decide the true status of the record pair after matching. Match rates and error rates for the two strategies are compared and a discussion of their similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses is presented.

The fusion sample obtained by a statistical matching process can be considered a sample out of an artificial population. The distribution of this artificial population is derived. If the correlation between specific variables is the only focus the strong demand for conditional independence can be weakened. In a simulation study the effects of violations of some assumptions leading to the distribution of the artificial population are examined. Finally some ideas concerning the establishing of the claimed conditional independence by latent class analysis are presented.

Following the problems with estimating underenumeration in the 1991 Census of England and Wales the aim for the 2001 Census is to create a database that is fully adjusted to net underenumeration. To achieve this, the paper investigates weighted donor imputation methodology that utilises information from both the census and census coverage survey (CCS). The US Census Bureau has considered a similar approach for their 2000 Census (see Isaki et al 1998). The proposed procedure distinguishes between individuals who are not counted by the census because their household is missed and those who are missed in counted households. Census data is linked to data from the CCS. Multinomial logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities that households are missed by the census and the probabilities that individuals are missed in counted households. Household and individual coverage weights are constructed from the estimated probabilities and these feed into the donor imputation procedure.

To reach their target audience efficiently, advertisers and media planners need information on which media their customers use. For instance, they may need to know what percentage of Diet Coke drinkers watch Baywatch, or how many AT&T customers have seen an advertisement for Sprint during the last week. All the relevant data could theoretically be collected from each respondent. However, obtaining full detailed and accurate information would be very expensive. It would also impose a heavy respondent burden under current data collection technology. This information is currently collected through separate surveys in New Zealand and in many other countries. Exposure to the major media is measured continuously, and product usage studies are common. Statistical matching techniques provide a way of combining these separate information sources. The New Zealand television ratings database was combined with a syndicated survey of print readership and product usage, using statistical matching. The resulting Panorama service meets the targeting information needs of advertisers and media planners. It has since been duplicated in Australia. This paper discusses the development of the statistical matching framework for combining these databases, and the heuristics and techniques used. These included an experiment conducted using a screening design to identify important matching variables. Studies evaluating and validating the combined results are also summarized. The following three major evaluation criteria were used; accuracy of combined results, statibility of combined results and the preservation of currency results from the component databases. The paper then discusses how the prerequisites for combining the databases were met. The biggest hurdle at this stage was the differences between the analysis techniques used on the two component databases. Finally, suggestions for developing similar statistical matching systems elsewhere will be given.

Data fusion as discussed here means to create a set of data on not jointly observed variables from two different sources. Suppose for instance that observations are available for (X,Z) on a set of individuals and for (Y,Z) on a different set of individuals. Each of X, Y and Z may be a vector variable. The main purpose is to gain insight into the joint distribution of (X,Y) using Z as a so-called matching variable. At first however, it is attempted to recover as much information as possible on the joint distribution of (X,Y,Z) from the distinct sets of data. Such fusions can only be done at the cost of implementing some distributional properties for the fused data. These are conditional independencies given the matching variables. Fused data are typically discussed from the point of view of how appropriate this underlying assumption is. Here we give a different perspective. We formulate the problem as follows: how can distributions be estimated in situations when only observations from certain marginal distributions are available. It can be solved by applying the maximum entropy criterium. We show in particular that data created by fusing different sources can be interpreted as a special case of this situation. Thus, we derive the needed assumption of conditional independence as a consequence of the type of data available.

The effect of the environment on health is of increasing concern, in particular the effects of the release of industrial pollutants into the air, the ground and into water. An assessment of the risks to public health of any particular pollution source is often made using the routine health, demographic and environmental data collected by government agencies. These datasets have important differences in sampling geography and in sampling epochs which affect the epidemiological analyses which draw them together. In the UK, health events are recorded for individuals, giving cause codes, a data of diagnosis or death, and using the unit postcode as a geographical reference. In contrast, small area demographic data are recorded only at the decennial census, and released as area level data in areas distinct from postcode geography. Environmental exposure data may be available at yet another resolution, depending on the type of exposure and the source of the measurements.

As the population ages, a greater demand for long-term care services and, in particular, nursing homes is expected. Policy analysts continue to search for alternative, less costly forms of care for the elderly and have attempted to develop programs to delay or prevent nursing-home entry. Health care administrators required information for planning the future demand for nursing-home services. This study assesses the relative importance of predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics in predicting and understanding nursing-home entry.

A population needs-based health care resource allocation model was developed and applied using age, sex and health status of populations to measure population need for health care in Ontario. To develop the model, provincial data on self-assessed health and health service utilization by age and sex from 62,413 respondents to the 1990 Ontario Health Survey (OHS) were used in combination with provincial health care expenditure data for the fiscal year 1995/96 by age and sex. The model was limited to the services that were covered in the OHS (general practitioner, specialist physician, optometry, physiotherapy, chiropractic and acute hospital). The distribution of utilization and expenditures between age-sex-health status categories was used to establish appropriate health care resource shares for each age-sex-health status combination. These resource shares were then applied to geographic populations using age, sex and health status data from the OHS together with more recent population estimates to determine the needs-based health care resource allocation for each area. Total dollar allocations were restricted to sum to the 1995/96 provincial budget and were compared with 1995/96 allocations to determine the extent to which Ontario allocations are consistent with the relative needs of the area populations.

To augment the amount of available information, data from different sources are increasingly being combined. These databases are often combined using record linkage methods. When there is no unique identifier, a probabilistic linkage is used. In that case, a record on a first file is associated with a probability that is linked to a record on a second file, and then a decision is taken on whether a possible link is a true link or not. This usually requires a non-negligible amount of manual resolution. It might then be legitimate to evaluate if manual resolution can be reduced or even eliminated. This issue is addressed in this paper where one tries to produce an estimate of a total (or a mean) of one population, when using a sample selected from another population linked somehow to the first population. In other words, having two populations linked through probabilistic record linkage, we try to avoid any decision concerning the validity of links and still be able to produce an unbiased estimate for a total of the one of two populations. To achieve this goal, we suggest the use of the Generalised Weight Share Method (GWSM) described by Lavallée (1995).

The application of dual system estimation (DSE) to matched Census / Post Enumeration Survey (PES) data in order to measure net undercount is well understood (Hogan, 1993). However, this approach has so far not been used to measure net undercount in the UK. The 2001 PES in the UK will use this methodology. This paper presents the general approach to design and estimation for this PES (the 2001 Census Coverage Survey). The estimation combines DSE with standard ratio and regression estimation. A simulation study using census data from the 1991 Census of England and Wales demonstrates that the ratio model is in general more robust than the regression model.