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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 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.

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.

The third edition of Canadian culture in perspective: a statistical overview, provides a comprehensive statistical portrait of the health and vitality of cultural activities and industries in Canada. This compendium incorporates data from all surveys in Statistics Canada's Culture Statistics Program, as well as data from other internal and external sources, enabling readers to track various themes and trends over time.

This edition contains sections on: the economic impact of the culture sector, culture activities by tourists and the international trade position of the culture sector; on social dimensions of culture, including characteristics of the cultural labour force, philanthropic behaviour, and the consumers of cultural goods and services; and on various sectors such as heritage, the performing arts and festivals, visual arts and libraries. It also explores ownership and content issues in the culture industries (publishing, film, broadcasting and music).

Canada's ports handled a record 382.0 million tonnes (Mt.) of cargo in 1999 and a record of 2.2 million TEURS (twenty-foot-equivalent units) of containers.

Third quarter 1999 operating ratios for top carriers improved by one point over the same period one year earlier to 0.93 but were unchanged in the fourth quarter (0.94). Average revenue per carrier grew by 3% in the third quarter and 4% in the fourth quarter.

Retirement issues have risen to the forefront of socio-economic debate in Canada through the nineties and will likely gain importance as we enter the new millennium. Employer pension plans are one of the primary programs in place to provide workers with income after retirement.

Pension plans in Canada: statistical highlights and key tables presents information on the terms, conditions and membership on all employers sponsored pension plans in Canada. This supplement to publication Pension plans in Canada (74-401-XIB) provides analysis and data on registered pension plans. The topics covered include province of employment, labour force/paid workers coverage, type of plan (defined benefit and defined contributions), size of plan, public and private sectors, contributory and non-contributory plans, employee and employer contributions.

This publication presents current and constant price estimates of provincial gross domestic product (GDP) for over 50 industries covering the entire Canadian economy, including aggregates and special industry groupings. The document also includes a comprehensive analytical review of the economy of each province and territory with summary text, tables and charts.

The Vancouver-San Francisco market experienced the largest year-over-year increase in passengers of all the major markets between 1997 and 1998. Toronto-Milwaukee was the mid-sized market which experienced the largest year-over-year increase, with 25,520 more passengers in 1998 than 1997.

The volume of air travel between the Canadian cities and American states presented in Text Table 2.1 generally reflects the underlying large inter-city markets.

The Canada-United States Open Skies Agreement, which was signed on February 24 1995, transformed the regulatory environment for air services between two countries. Text Table 3.1 shows the changes in the level of travel between the U.S. and the eight most-frequented Canadian cities since 1995.

Scheduled air trips to or from Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta represented a greater proportion of total Canada-United States air travel than residents of these provinces represented of the total Canadian population. Alberta residents represented 9.6% of Canada's total population in 1998, while Alberta represented 11.8% of the total number of Canada-U.S. air travellers. Even more markedly, the populations of Ontario and British Columbia represented 37.7% and 13.2% respectively of the total Canadian population, while Ontario represented 44.4% of total Canada-U.S. travelers and British Columbia represented 20.8%.

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.

This paper describes the methodology for the longitudinal and cross-sectional weights produced by the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). It also presents problems the survey has encountered and proposed solutions.

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.

In recognition of Survey Methodology's silver anniversary, this paper reviews the major advances in survey research that have taken place in the past 25 years. It provides a gneneral overview of developments in: the survey research profession; survey methodology - questionnaire design, data collection methods, handling missing data, survey sampling, and total survey error; and survey applications - panel surveys, international surveys, and secondary analysis. It also attempts to forecast some future developments in these areas.

Computation is an integral part of statistical analysis in general and survey sampling in particular. What kinds of analyses can be carried out will depend upon what kind of computational power is available. The general development of sampling theory is traced in connection with technological developments in computation.

Mahalanobis provided an example of how to use statistics to enlighten and inform government policy makers. His pioneering work was used by the US Bureau of the Census to learn more about measurement errors in censuses and surveys. People have many misconceptions about censuses, among them who is to be counted and where. Errors in the census do occur, among them errors in coverage. Over the years, the US Bureau of the Census has developed statistical techniques, including sampling in the census, to increase accuracy and reduce response burden.

A components-of-variance approach and an estimated covariance error structure were used in constructing predictors of adjustment factors for the 1990 Decennial Census. The variability of the estimated covariance matrix is the suspected cause of certain anomalies that appeared in the regression estimation and in the estimated adjustment factors. We investigate alternative prediction methods and propose a procedure that is less influenced by variability in the estimated covariance matrix. The proposed methodology is applied to a data set composed of 336 adjustment factors from the 1990 Post Enumeration Survey.

The 1996 Canadian Census is adjusted for coverage error as estimated primarily through the Reverse Record Check (RRC). In this paper, we will show how there is a wealth of additional information from the 1996 Reverse Record Check of direct value to population estimation. Beyond its ability to estimate coverage error, it is possible to extend the Reverse Record Check classification results to obtain an alternative estimate of demographic growth - potentially decomposed by component. This added feature of the Reverse Record Check provides promise in the evaluation of estimated census coverage error as well as insight as to possible problems in the estimation of selected components in the population estimates program.

Longitudinal observations consist of repeated measurements on the same units over a number of occasions, with fixed or varying time spells between the occasions. Each vector observation can be viewed therefore as a time series, usually of short length. Analyzing the measurements for all the units permits the fitting of low-order time series models, despite the short lengths of the individual series.

This paper suggests estimating the conditional mean squared error of small area estimators to evaluate their accuracy. This mean squared error is conditional in the sense that it measures the variability with respect to the sampling design for a particular realization of the smoothing model underlying the small area estimators. An unbiased estimators for the conditional mean squared error is easily constructed using Stein's Lemma for the expectation of normal random variables.

Imputation is a common procedure to compensate for nonresponse in survey problems. Using auxiliary data, imputation may produce estimators that are more efficient than the one constructed by ignoring nonrespondents and re-weighting. We study and compare the mean squared errors of survey estimators based on data imputed using three difference imputation techniques: the commonly used ratio imputation method and two cold deck imputation methods that are frequently adopted in economic area surveys conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This guide presents information of interest to users of data from the Survey of Household Spending. Data are collected via personal interview conducted in January, February and March after the reference year using a paper questionnaire. Information is gathered about the spending habits, dwelling characteristics and household equipment of Canadian households during the reference year. The survey covers private households in the ten provinces and three territories. (The three territories are surveyed every second year.)

This guide includes definitions of survey terms and variables and descriptions of survey methodology and data quality. There is also a section describing the various statistics that can be created using expenditure data (e.g., budget share, market share, and aggregates).

The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of existing methods and techniques making use of personal identifiers to support record linkage. Record linkage can be loosely defined as a methodology for manipulating and / or transforming personal identifiers from individual data records from one or more operational databases and subsequently attempting to match these personal identifiers to create a composite record about an individual. Record linkage is not intended to uniquely identify individuals for operational purposes; however, it does provide probabilistic matches of varying degrees of reliability for use in statistical reporting. Techniques employed in record linkage may also be of use for investigative purposes to help narrow the field of search against existing databases when some form of personal identification information exists.

Statistics Canada publishes several measures of farm income, each produced for a different purpose. This bulletin describes the concepts behind these different measures, the methods by which the measures are constructed, and the uses for which they were designed.

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.

This paper describes the collection method and content of the 1999 Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) income interview.

This report summarizes the comments received in response to a discussion paper on low income cut-offs released in January 2000.

This publication includes a list of federal and provincial courts across the country. The purpose of this directory is to identify all courts (permanent and most frequently visited circuit points) in Canada by type, level, and location.

The publication guides the user through the vast array of labour market and income data sources. It offers detailed descriptions of the various surveys, including the data collected. A summary chart gives snapshot information for comparisons.

This practical and informative guide for manufacturers and exporters will assist in navigating through numerous Statistics Canada products and services. In addition, some recent articles and research papers have been highlighted.

This report explains the concept of income and provides definitions of the various sources of income and derived income variables. It also documents the various aspects of the census that can have an impact on census income estimates.