Economic accounts

Description: To provide statistical information and analysis of the value of Canada's merchandise exports and imports by commodity, province or territory, partner country, and other relevant dimensions on a customs basis.

Description: To provide statistical information on the value of Canada's merchandise exports and imports by commodity and by partner country, on a balance of payments basis.

Description: To provide trade prices and volume measurement (including constant dollars) for integration to the Canadian Macroeconomic Accounts framework, forecasting, deflation processes and price measurement.

Description: The estimates are derived in order to supply the System of National Accounts (SNA) with the compensation of employees component of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

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Monthly data on international investment position, foreign portfolio investment in Canadian equity and investment fund shares by type of instrument, by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), at market value.

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Information on new issuances of securities by type of use of proceeds and by industry. The use of proceeds includes for merger and acquisition, exploration, for research and development, for working capital, for debt repayment and refinancing, and for general corporate purposes.

Description: The infrastructure economic accounts represents a set of statistical statements that record the economic, social and environmental impacts related to the production and use of infrastructure in Canada and each province and territory. The infrastructure economic accounts are organized using a statistical framework that outlines the concepts, classification systems and methods required to construct the accounts. This statistical framework is consistent with the Canadian system of national accounts, Canadian government finance statistics and Canada's balance of payments. This consistency permits users to analyze the infrastructure related statistical statements in the context of economy wide measures such as investment, gross domestic product (GDP), national income and wealth.

Description: Infrastructure is the physical structures and systems that support the production of goods and services and their delivery to and consumption by governments, businesses and citizens. The industry undertaking that infrastructure investment is also presented. Accumulating investment flows over time produces an estimate of the stock of infrastructure assets. The perpetual inventory method is used as it estimates a value of the net stock of fixed assets in existence and in the hands of producers which is generally based on estimating how many of the fixed assets installed, as a result of investment undertaken in previous years, have survived to the current period. The depreciation of that stock is calculated using the geometric method with asset specific depreciation profiles.

Description: The economic contribution as a result of the production of infrastructure assets due to investment is presented for valued added (GDP), compensation of employees and number of jobs. Value-added is a key measure of economic performance. It represents the output of an industry minus the value of intermediate inputs that were used up in the production of the goods and services. Within the Infrastructure Economic Accounts, this is the value added due to an industry's production of infrastructure assets. The number of jobs represents the number of jobs held by the self-employed, employees and unpaid family workers. The compensation of employees represents the wages and salaries, and supplementary labour income due to labour inputs for the production of infrastructure assets.

Description: The average age of investment is the weighted age of all investments remaining in the gross stock at year end. The remaining useful life, which is the difference between the average age of the investment spending and their expected service life, is then divided by the expected service life, creating a ratio that indicates the percentage of the asset class that remains.

Description: Expansion of the Infrastructure Economic Accounts focusing on the environmental aspect to aid in understanding the relationship between investment in infrastructure and the environment. Main indicators include greenhouse gas emissions as a result of production of infrastructure assets, greenhouse gas emissions per value-added, and clean input proportion.

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Debt service ratios, interest and obligated principal payments on debt, and related statistics for households, Canada.

Description: Quarterly national balance sheet, financial flows, and other changes in assets accounts data presented in a from-whom-to whom basis for selected financial instruments.

Description: The Canadian Economic Tracker presents selected monthly indicators from Statistics Canada's Common Output Database Repository (CODR) to highlight interrelated dynamics within the Canadian economy.

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This paper estimates and analyses the economic impact of the culture sector on the Canadian provinces. It measures the contribution of the culture sector to provincial GDP and employment between 1996 and 2003.

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This study is the third in a series related to the project launched in fall 2003 by the Canadian Productivity Accounts of Statistics Canada in order to compare productivity levels between Canada and the United States. The study's purpose is to examine the comparability of the components of the labour market of these two countries that serve as the sources of the differences in the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita between them. This study can be subdivided into three sections. The first section develops and illustrates the conceptual and methodological framework required to make Canada/United States estimates of labour and population comparable in terms of level. The second section presents revisions and an update to 2005 of the GDP per capita differences and its components, which were presented for the first time in the study by Baldwin, Maynard and Wong (2005), which covered the period from 1994 to 2002, at the time.

Lastly, using the year 2000 as an example, this study tries to quantify the "statistical error" that arises from using inadequate statistics or statistics not designed for this type of international comparison. This exercise reveals that the comparability of data on hours worked per job is especially crucial to identifying the origin of the differences in GDP per capita between labour productivity and hours worked per capita. The worst error involves comparing hours worked estimated from an employer survey with those obtained from a household survey. This type of comparison between Canada and the United States results in assigning an estimated 72% of the difference in GDP per capita to labour productivity when, in reality, it counted for barely 36% in 2000.

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This paper reports on the update to 2005 of the Human Resource Module (HRM) of the Tourism Satellite Account developed by Statistics Canada. The HRM provides detailed information on employment related to tourism. Information on wages and salaries, number of jobs and hours worked by occupation are included. Occupational data is further disaggregated by age, gender and immigration status. This study provides a resource for training and planning for tourism.

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The productivity slowdown during 2006 largely originated in the mining and manufacturing industries. The drop in mining was part of a long-term trend, while for manufacturing it was mostly cyclical. Many sectors struggled with labour quality as a result of shortages, especially in western Canada.

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This note presents background and notes on the treatment in the National Accounts, including the Balance of Payments, of transactions resulting from the Softwood Lumber Agreement between Canada and the United States that was signed in October of 2006. Due to the unique nature of these transactions the note explains how funds were transacted and treated in various accounts of Canadian macro economic accounts.

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A guide to the pitfalls of using the federal sector of the Provincial Accounts in assessing which provinces benefit the most from federal activities.

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The latest annual results for the US/Canada purchasing power parities (PPPs) and real expenditure indexes in the US compared with Canada are published in this paper for the period 1992 to 2005. Revisions to previously published data and an update using the latest US and Canada expenditure data from the National Accounts and in-depth price comparisons for 2002 are incorporated, and a new type-of-product presentation is included. The paper provides a primer on purchasing power parities and related measures and why they are important in international comparisons of economic performance.

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Productivity statistics garner much attention because they are key indicators of economic progress. This paper reports on the average growth in provincial labour productivity from 1997 to 2005. It examines how medium-term differences in productivity growth have affected the relative levels of labour productivity in different provinces. The data show that the relative position of most provinces has remained fairly stable over the 1997-to-2005 period when benchmarked against changes in the national average. The notable exception is Newfoundland and Labrador, which experienced much stronger average productivity growth during this period than other provinces. This growth substantially improved its relative labour productivity when evaluated in real terms.

The paper also examines the effect that a second factor - changes in the prices received for products - has had on nominal productivity differences between provinces. The data show that the resource-rich provinces of Alberta and Newfoundland and Labrador have benefited substantially from higher relative prices.

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This paper employs the databases that are used to construct Statistics Canada's Productivity Accounts to examine the sources of growth in the Canadian economy and the history of productivity growth in Canada over the period 1961 to 2002. It makes use of a new time series using the North American Industry Classification System. The growth accounting system provides the framework for the analysis. This framework provides estimates of the relative importance of labour inputs, investments in capital, and productivity growth. The data that are required to address this issue also allow changes in the composition of capital and labour inputs to be investigated. In addition, the underlying factors that determine labour productivity (multifactor productivity, capital deepening, and increases in skill level) are outlined. Since the database is constructed at the industry level, all these relationships can be pursued both at the level of the total economy and for individual industries.

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Since 2002, the trade surplus has been buttressed by high prices for energy and metals, the only areas where exports were growing. Falling exports and strong domestic demand has reduced the trade balance in all other sectors, notably autos and consumer investment goods.

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These educational resources provide instructors with innovative materials, lesson plans and case study assignments based on environmental statistics produced by Statistics Canada. Resources have been developed for educators at the elementary, high school and post-secondary levels.

Curriculum links include grades 1 to 12 geography, social studies, biology, mathematics, science and economics, as well as introductory post-secondary geography and environmental science.

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Results of the redesigned Capital and Repair Expenditures Survey were released on May 4, 2015. With this redesign, macroeconomic accounting adjustments that were previously applied to the survey results, to better align with System of National Accounts (SNA) concepts, will no longer be made. This note provides users with an overview of the concepts of capital expenditure and gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) and the adjustments that are needed in order to bring capital expenditure in line with the SNA concept of GFCF.

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Estimates of the underground economy by province and territory for the period 2007 to 2012 are now available for the first time. The objective of this technical note is to explain how the methodology employed to derive upper-bound estimates of the underground economy for the provinces and territories differs from that used to derive national estimates.

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The Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts (CSMA) is a source of invaluable information for business, governments and citizens. These accounts provide users with important insights into the inner-workings of the economy, current economic trends and interactions between the various sectors of the economy. In order for these accounts to remain relevant, the underlying concepts, methods, classification systems and data sources need to be periodically updated.

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Oil and gas exploration, development and production activities continue to grow in importance, making it essential that the appropriate level and growth of these activities are included in the measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Statistics Canada recently began incorporating results from the Quarterly Survey of Capital Expenditures – Oil and Gas Activities in sub-annual GDP statistics (for years 2011, 2013, 2014). This note provides a brief overview of the survey and the incorporation of its results when estimating quarterly investment.

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An overview of the Canadian Government Finance Statistics (CGFS) framework; how it relates to other government statistics such as the Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts and the Public Accounts; and the new GFS data products available to users

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Beginning in November 2014, International Trade in goods data will be provided on a Balance of Payments (BOP) basis for additional country detail. In publishing this data, BOP-based exports to and imports from 27 countries, referred to as Canada’s Principal Trading Partners (PTPs), will be highlighted for the first time. BOP-based trade in goods data will be available for countries such as China and Mexico, Brazil and India, South Korea, and our largest European Union trading partners, in response to substantial demand for information on these countries in recent years. Until now, Canada’s geographical trading patterns have been examined almost exclusively through analysis of Customs-based trade data. Moreover, BOP trade in goods data for these countries will be available alongside the now quarterly Trade in Services data as well as annual Foreign Direct Investment data for many of these Principal Trading Partners, facilitating country-level international trade and investment analysis using fully comparable data. The objective of this article is to introduce these new measures. This note will first walk users through the key BOP concepts, most importantly the concept of change in ownership. This will serve to familiarize analysts with the Balance of Payments framework for analyzing country-level data, in contrast to Customs-based trade data. Second, some preliminary analysis will be reviewed to illustrate the concepts, with provisional estimates for BOP-based trade with China serving as the principal example. Lastly, we will outline the expansion of quarterly trade in services to generate new estimates of trade for the PTPs and discuss future work in trade statistics.

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The methodology for estimating the Flows and Stocks of Fixed Capital has been redeveloped to ensure greater coherence of the capital stock program within the Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts (CSMA). This is done by incorporating investment flows directly from the CSMA on a detailed industry/asset basis. The data released will be based on the input-output final demand classification, with updated per asset depreciation profiles and prices.

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Canadian international merchandise trade data are released monthly and may be revised in subsequent releases as new information becomes available. These data are released approximately 35 days following the close of the reference period and represent one of the timeliest economic indicators produced by Statistics Canada. Given their timeliness, some of the data are not received in time and need to be estimated or modelled. This is the case for imports and exports of crude petroleum and natural gas. More specifically, at the time of release, energy trade data are based on an incomplete set of information and are revised as Statistics Canada and National Energy Board information becomes available in the subsequent months. Due to the increasing importance of energy imports and exports and the timeliness of the data, the revisions to energy prices and volumes are having an increasingly significant impact on the monthly revision to Canada’s trade balance. This note explains how the estimates in the initial release are made when data sources are not yet available, and how the original data are adjusted in subsequent releases.

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These educational resources provide instructors with innovative materials, lesson plans and case study assignments to accompany the 2013 release of the Human Activity and the Environment article, “Measuring ecosystem goods and services in Canada.” The materials and activities were developed by the Critical Thinking Consortium, a non-profit, registered association of 55 educational partners—school districts, schools, teacher associations and other educational organizations.

Resources were developed for a junior high school, senior high school and introductory post-secondary audience. Curriculum links include grades 7 to 12 geography, social studies, biology, science and economics, as well as introductory post-secondary geography and environmental science.