Business performance and ownership

Description: The need for alternative data sources is of growing importance for both supplementing Statistics Canada's data holdings and for nowcasting economic activity. In response to this need, Statistics Canada initiated the development of a Real-time Local Business Conditions Index (RT-LBCI). The index brings together data from a few different sources, including Google's Places API (containing data on temporary and permanent businesses closures), TomTom Real-time traffic API (road traffic data), as well as information from Statistics Canada data holdings (monthly retail and wholesale, Business Register, etc.). The project aims to compute a near real-time index of economic activity in Canadian major cities.

Description: This table contains 38 series, with data starting from 1957 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada), Rates (38 items: Bank rate; Chartered bank administered interest rates - prime business; Chartered bank - consumer loan rate; Forward premium or discount (-), United States dollars in Canada: 1 month; ...).

Description:

Monthly Canadian manufacturers' sales, new orders, unfilled orders, raw materials, goods or work in process, finished goods, total inventories, inventory to sales ratios and finished goods to sales ratios for durable and non-durable goods by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), in dollars unless otherwise noted. Unadjusted and seasonally adjusted values available from January 1992 to the current reference month.

Description:

Monthly manufacturers' sales, inventories, orders and inventory-to-sales ratios, for motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts manufacturing industries, and motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing industries, in dollars unless otherwise noted.

Description:

This table contains 27 series, with data starting from 1981 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada); Type of currency (27 items: Australian dollar, daily average; Brazilian real, daily average; Chinese renminbi, daily average; European euro, daily average; ...).

Description:

The RT-LBCI is released as an experimental statistic. It is intended to provide a real-time signal on business activities following the disruptions brought about by the pandemic and through the recovery phase.

Description: The Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA) Data Portal is a collaboration between Statistics Canada and Natural Resources Canada, which administers the ESTMA. The ESTMA helps the Government of Canada deter corruption in the extractive sector by requiring extractive entities that are active in Canada to publicly disclose, on an annual basis, certain types of payments made to governments in Canada and abroad. The goal of the data portal is to increase the accessibility and utility of the payment information collected under the ESTMA by bringing together all available ESTMA data in one online location, and further enriching the payment data with analytical functions that help users to leverage the complete ESTMA dataset. The database has also been designed with mobility in mind to ensure that users and stakeholders have mobile access to ESTMA data.

Description: This table contains 8 series, with data starting from 1992 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada), Rates (8 items: Bank rate; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 3 month; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 6 month; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 1 year; ...).

Description: This table contains 6 series, with data starting from 1951 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 items: Canada ...), Type of reserve (6 items: Convertible foreign currencies; other than United States; Total; Canada's official international reserves; Gold; Convertible foreign currencies; United States dollars ...).

Description: The summary statistics by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) which include: operating revenue (dollars x 1,000,000), operating expenses (dollars x 1,000,000), salaries wages and benefits (dollars x 1,000,000), and operating profit margin (by percent), of automotive repair and maintenance (NAICS 8111), annual, for five years of data.

Description: The need for alternative data sources is of growing importance for both supplementing Statistics Canada's data holdings and for nowcasting economic activity. In response to this need, Statistics Canada initiated the development of a Real-time Local Business Conditions Index (RT-LBCI). The index brings together data from a few different sources, including Google's Places API (containing data on temporary and permanent businesses closures), TomTom Real-time traffic API (road traffic data), as well as information from Statistics Canada data holdings (monthly retail and wholesale, Business Register, etc.). The project aims to compute a near real-time index of economic activity in Canadian major cities.

Description: This table contains 38 series, with data starting from 1957 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada), Rates (38 items: Bank rate; Chartered bank administered interest rates - prime business; Chartered bank - consumer loan rate; Forward premium or discount (-), United States dollars in Canada: 1 month; ...).

Description:

Monthly Canadian manufacturers' sales, new orders, unfilled orders, raw materials, goods or work in process, finished goods, total inventories, inventory to sales ratios and finished goods to sales ratios for durable and non-durable goods by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), in dollars unless otherwise noted. Unadjusted and seasonally adjusted values available from January 1992 to the current reference month.

Description:

Monthly manufacturers' sales, inventories, orders and inventory-to-sales ratios, for motor vehicle and motor vehicle parts manufacturing industries, and motor vehicle body and trailer manufacturing industries, in dollars unless otherwise noted.

Description:

This table contains 27 series, with data starting from 1981 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada); Type of currency (27 items: Australian dollar, daily average; Brazilian real, daily average; Chinese renminbi, daily average; European euro, daily average; ...).

Description:

The RT-LBCI is released as an experimental statistic. It is intended to provide a real-time signal on business activities following the disruptions brought about by the pandemic and through the recovery phase.

Description: The Extractive Sector Transparency Measures Act (ESTMA) Data Portal is a collaboration between Statistics Canada and Natural Resources Canada, which administers the ESTMA. The ESTMA helps the Government of Canada deter corruption in the extractive sector by requiring extractive entities that are active in Canada to publicly disclose, on an annual basis, certain types of payments made to governments in Canada and abroad. The goal of the data portal is to increase the accessibility and utility of the payment information collected under the ESTMA by bringing together all available ESTMA data in one online location, and further enriching the payment data with analytical functions that help users to leverage the complete ESTMA dataset. The database has also been designed with mobility in mind to ensure that users and stakeholders have mobile access to ESTMA data.

Description: This table contains 8 series, with data starting from 1992 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 item: Canada), Rates (8 items: Bank rate; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 3 month; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 6 month; Treasury bill auction - average yields: 1 year; ...).

Description: This table contains 6 series, with data starting from 1951 (not all combinations necessarily have data for all years). This table contains data described by the following dimensions (Not all combinations are available): Geography (1 items: Canada ...), Type of reserve (6 items: Convertible foreign currencies; other than United States; Total; Canada's official international reserves; Gold; Convertible foreign currencies; United States dollars ...).

Description: The summary statistics by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) which include: operating revenue (dollars x 1,000,000), operating expenses (dollars x 1,000,000), salaries wages and benefits (dollars x 1,000,000), and operating profit margin (by percent), of automotive repair and maintenance (NAICS 8111), annual, for five years of data.

Description:

Small firms are often seen to be the engines of growth. There are two main sources of empirical evidence that are adduced to support this conclusion. The first is that job creation has been coming mainly from small firms. The second is that the share of employment accounted for by small firms has increased in the past two decades. Both of these sources rely on a simple metric--employment. This paper asks whether changes in this metric affect the view of the role that small firms play in the growth process.

The first section of the paper maintains employment as the measure that is used to evaluate the importance of small firms but modifies the raw measure of employment to correct for the fact that small firms pay lower wages than large firms. The paper examines the evidence indicating that smaller producers in the manufacturing sector pay lower wages and that this differential has grown over time. It then uses relative wage rates to create a measure of employment that is adjusted for wage differentials. When this is done, small producers no longer outperform large producers in terms of job creation over the 1970s and 1980s in the Canadian manufacturing sector.

The second section of the paper changes the metric used to evaluate relative performance by moving from employment to output and labour productivity. The paper demonstrates that while small producers have increased their employment share dramatically, they have barely changed their output share. Small firms have been falling behind large firms both with respect to wages paid and labour productivity. Large producers have been decreasing their relative employment while maintaining their relative output share, thereby making dramatic strides in increasing their relative labour productivity.

Description:

Firm turnover occurs as firms gain and lose market share as part of the competitive struggle. The reallocation of market share from one group to another is associated with productivity gain as the less productive lose share and the more productive gain market share. This paper examines the extent to which productivity has been enhanced by firm turnover over the last twenty years. It focuses on the extent to which this process changed during the 1980s and thereby contributed to the slowdown in productivity growth that was experienced by the manufacturing sector.

Description:

This paper outlines the structure of payroll taxes and documents evidence on the level, growth and role of each component over the last three decades for Canada and for each province. Levied by both the federal and provincial governments, payroll taxes in Canada include four major components: i) unemployment insurance (UI) premiums; ii) Canada/Quebec Pension Plan (C/QPP) contributions; iii) workers compensation (WC) premiums; and iv) the provincial health/post-secondary education (H/E) tax levied by Quebec, Manitoba, Ontario and Newfoundland. While the UI and C/QPP components are levied on both employers and employees, the WC and H/E components are levied on employers only. Our main findings are 1) payroll taxes have increased substantially over the last three decades in Canada as a whole and in every province; 2) the structure, level, growth and role of each component of payroll taxes vary remarkably from one province to another; 3) the expansion of the UI component in recent years has been the largest contributor to the rise in payroll taxes across every province in the country; and 4) despite significant growth in recent years, payroll taxes are still much lower in Canada than in most other western industrialized countries.

Description:

This paper investigates the dynamics of job reallocation in the manufacturing sector of Canada. It does so by examining the pattern and magnitude of job gain, job loss, and total job turnover due to growth and decline of some firms, and entry and exit of other firms. It also investigates how the effect of cyclical as opposed to structural influences on job turnover have changed over time. Finally, the paper investigates whether the pattern and magnitude of job turnover differ across industries and across regions, and whether the differences are either caused by differences in cyclical sensitivity of job creation and job destruction or in the extent to which restructuring is taking place.

Description:

This paper examines the maturation process of firms that enter an industry by constructing new plant and investigates the extent to which improvements in the performance of an entry cohort are the result of a selection process that culls out the most inefficient entrants or of a learning process that allows survivors to improve their performance relative to incumbent firms. Both selection and evolutionary learning are related to post-entry performance. Despite the difference in the effect of selection and learning on the amount of post-entry growth, selection per se is a more important contributor to overall growth of a cohort.

Description:

This study examines the characteristics of small and medium-sized firms that perform training. It uses data taken from a recent Statistics Canada survey that permit firms' training decisions to be analyzed within the broader context of their many activities and strategies.

The study finds strong evidence for the hypothesis that human capital development facilitated by training is complementary to innovation and technological change. Training incidence is found to be closely related to the importance that a firm gives to research and development, the use of new technologies, and numerous other strategies that are related to innovation. Training is also greater where a firm emphasizes quality and a comprehensive human-resource strategy. The results point to the inherent complementarity of technology and human resources policy.

Description:

This study investigates differences in the policies being pursued by innovative and non-innovative firms. It focuses on a broad group of strategies -- in marketing, finance, production, management and human resources and asks whether there are key areas in which the strategies being followed by innovative and non-innovative firms differ. It also asks how the activities of firms in each of these areas differs. Finally, it compares the performance of innovative and non-innovative firms. The study finds that innovative firms place a greater emphasis on management, human resources, marketing, financing, government programs and services, and production efficiencies. In most of these areas, innovative firms pursue activities more intensively. Finally, innovative firms are more successful than non-innovative firms.

Description:

This study examines the differences in strategies and activities pursued by a sample of more-successful and less-successful group of growing small- and medium-sized enterprises. Amongst other matters, it examines different functional strategies -- the importance of management, human resource practices, marketing, financing, and the innovativeness of the firm. Innovative activities are the most important determinants of success; that is, for a wide range of industries, they serve to discriminate between the more- and the less-successful firms better than any other variable. Almost all of the strategy questions that relate to innovative activity receive higher scores from the more-successful group of firms than from the less-successful group of firms. This is also the case for innovative activities -- whether a firm possesses an R&D unit, its expenditure on R&D relative to total investment, and its R&D-to-sales ratio.

Description:

This paper uses job turnover data to compare how job creation, job destruction and net job change differ for small and large establishments in the Canadian manufacturing sector. It uses several different techniques to correct for the regression-to-the-mean problem that, it has been suggested, might incorrectly lead to the conclusion that small establishments create a disproportionate number of new jobs. It finds that net job creation for smaller establishments is greater than that of large establishments after such changes are made. The paper also compares the importance of small and large establishments in the manufacturing sectors of Canada and the United States. The Canadian manufacturing sector is shown to have both a larger proportion of employment in smaller establishments but also to have a small establishment sector that is growing in importance relative to that of the United States.

Description:

The statistical observation that small firms have created the majority of new jobs during the 1980s has had a tremendous influence on public policy. Governmentshave looked to the small firm sector for employment growth, and have promoted policies to augment this expansion. However, recent research in the US suggeststhat net job creation in the small firm sector may have been overestimated, relative to that in large firms. This paper addresses various measurement issues raised inthe recent research, and uses a very unique Canadian longitudinal data set that encompasses all companies in the Canadian economy to reassess the issue of jobcreation by firm size. We conclude that over the 1978-92 period, for both the entire Canadian economy and the manufacturing sector, the growth rate of (net)employment decreases monotonically as the size of firm increases, no matter which method of sizing firms is used. The small firm sector has accounted for adisproportionate share of both gross job gains and job losses, and in that aggregate, accounted for a disproportionate share of the employment increase over theperiod. Measurement does matter, however, as the magnitude of the difference in the growth rates of small and large firms is very sensitive to the measurementapproaches used. The paper also produces results for various industrial sectors, asks whether the more rapid growth in industries with a high proportion of smallfirms is responsible for the findings at the all-economy level, and examines employment growth in existing small and large firms (ie excluding births). It is found thatemployment growth in the population of existing small and large firms is very similar.

Description: Rural Canada Non-Profits (RCNP) is a database that provides estimates of Non-Profit Organization (NPO) counts, total revenue and total employment in Canada. This document presents the data sources, methods and classification concepts used in the production of the RCNP.

Description:

The North American Product Classification System (NAPCS) is the departmental standard for the classification of products (goods and services). The classification is a joint project of the national statistical agencies of Canada, Mexico and the United States. NAPCS is used to produce product statistics on a variety of topics, including the value of outputs of industries, the consumption by businesses and households, the value of imports and exports, and the movement of industrial and raw material prices. NAPCS Canada comprises definitions for all categories that include a descriptive text, as well as illustrative examples, inclusions and exclusions where appropriate.

Email: statcan.csds-standardsproducts-cnsd-normesproduits.statcan@statcan.gc.ca

Description:

The mandate of the Analytical Studies Branch (ASB) is to provide high-quality, relevant and timely information on economic, health and social issues that are important to Canadians. The branch strategically makes use of expert knowledge and a large range of statistical sources to describe, draw inferences from, and make objective and scientifically supported deductions about the evolving nature of the Canadian economy and society. Research questions are addressed by applying leading-edge methods, including microsimulation and predictive analytics using a range of linked and integrated administrative and survey data. In supporting greater access to data, ASB linked data are made available to external researchers and policy makers to support evidence-based decision making. Research results are disseminated by the branch using a range of mediums (i.e., research papers, studies, infographics, videos, and blogs) to meet user needs. The branch also provides analytical support and training, feedback, and quality assurance to the wide range of programs within and outside Statistics Canada.

Description:

The Chart of Accounts comprises a balance sheet, an income statement and selected other accounts. The balance sheet provides information on the financial position of a business. The income statement provides information on the performance of a business. The elements of the balance sheet are assets, liabilities and equity. The elements of the income statement are revenues; expenses; gains/losses, corporate taxes and other items; and extraordinary gains/losses, non-recurring items and adjustments.

Description:

This paper provides an overview of the productivity program at Statistics Canada and a brief description of Canada's productivity performance. The paper defines productivity and the various measures that are used to investigate different aspects of productivity growth. It describes the difference between partial productivity measures (such as labour productivity) and a more complete measure (multifactor productivity) and the advantages and disadvantages of each. The paper explains why productivity is important. It outlines how productivity growth fits into the growth accounting framework and how this framework is used to examine the various sources of economic growth. The paper briefly discusses the challenges that face statisticians in measuring productivity growth. It also provides an overview of Canada's long-term productivity performance and compares Canada to the United States - both in terms of productivity levels and productivity growth rates.

Description:

This newsletter is a brief description of projects within the Business and Labour Market Analysis Division of Statistics Canada. The research covers a wide range of topics including labour market issues, low income, immigration, business firm dynamics, pensions, productivity, technology and innovation, as well as economic geography.

Description:

This product contains presentations done at Statistics Canada's annual Economic Conference which provides a forum for the exchange of empirical research among the business, government, research and labour communities. The conference is also a means to promote economic and socio-economic analysis while subjecting existing data to critical assessment as part of an ongoing process of statistical development and review.

Description:

This activity is designed to show students some of the changes affecting Prairie agriculture over the past 100 years, and how Prairie farmers have adapted to them.

Description:

This paper discusses the approach that Statistics Canada has taken to improve the quality of annual business surveys through their integration in the Unified Enterprise Survey (UES). The primary objective of the UES is to measure the final annual sales of goods and services accurately by province, in sufficient detail and in a timely manner.

This paper describes the methodological approaches that the UES has used to improve financial and commodity data quality in four broad areas. These include improved coherence of the data collected from different levels of the enterprise, better coverage of industries, better depth of information (in the sense of more content detail and estimates for more detailed domains) and better consistency of the concepts and methods across industries.

The approach, in achieving quality, has been to (a) establish a base measure of the quality of the business survey program prior to the UES, (b) measure the annual data quality of the UES, and (c) carry out specific studies to better understand the quality of UES data and methods.

Description:

The purpose of this paper is to provide some general background and describe the methodology of the pilot year Unified Enterprise Survey (UES). It also illustrates the role of the Unified Enterprise Survey Program (UESP) within The Project to Improve Provincial Economic Statistics (PIPES) program. This information package is targeted toward external clients, for example the Provincial Focal Points, enabling them to assess future data releases planned by industry sector. The scope of this information package will be expanded as subsequent data releases over the next six months or so provide more industry specific details for the seven new pilot industries included in the 1997 UES. This document is approximately twenty-two pages in length and is to be offered at no charge to callers requesting information on the UES.