Canadian Productivity Accounts is an electronic publication that contains a series of tables on productivity growth and related variables for the business sector and its 15 major sectors based on the North American Classification System. These tables allow users to have a broader perspective on the Canadian economic performance. They complement the information available on CANSIM which offers more details, particularly, at the industry level. ¹

Canadian Productivity Accounts covers four series of statistical tables:

1. The annual trend of value-added, capital cost and labour cost in current dollars,
2. Annual indexes and growth rates of productivity and related measures,
3. Annual indexes and growth rates of prices and unit costs, and
4. Comparison of labour productivity growth and related measures in the business sector between Canada and the United States.

Productivity measures the efficiency with which inputs (labour and capital in particular) are utilized in production. Productivity measures can be applied to a single input, such as output per hour (labour productivity), as well as to combined labour and capital inputs (multifactor productivity). Statistics Canada produces these two main measures of productivity, but other productivity ratios can also be measured (e.g. output per unit of capital services).

For the overall business sector, productivity measures exclude all non-business production activities as well as the rents of owner-occupied dwellings.

For the business sector productivity measures, output is measured as real GDP—deliveries in constant chained dollars of final goods and services by the business sector to domestic households, government and non-profit institutions, as well as public and private investments and net exports to other countries. At the industry level, output is defined in terms of constant chained dollars of value added. Real value added series reflect both the real contribution of both capital and labour that transforms intermediate inputs into finished products for each industry. The estimates of output reflect the capitalization of software expenditures.

Annual estimates of productivity provided in these tables are consistent with the concepts of the System of National Accounts. They are derived from a Fisher chained index of GDP, or of value added.

The reader will find a glossary in Appendix I of this publication. It provides basic definitions of the terms used in the statistical tables and it constitutes a useful tool to understand productivity measures and related statistics.