Preface

This report is part of an initiative by Statistics Canada to fully document and thus, promote better understanding of the key economic series published by the agency. The purpose of this work is to describe in detail all aspects of monthly Gross Domestic Product by industry, also known as output-based Gross Domestic Product, one of the major economic indicators produced by the Canadian System of National Accounts.

The first estimates of monthly output by industry were released in 1926 and ever since, monthly measures have been prepared and published by Statistics Canada on a regular and continuing basis. Initially, these estimates were constructed only for the mining, manufacturing and public utilities industries (known as the Index of Industrial Production), but during the decades that followed the concepts and methods have evolved and eventually the scope of the estimates expanded to cover all non-agricultural output. Published with a lag of between 2 to 3 months, regular quarterly releases of non-agricultural output began in 1964 and four years later the coverage was expanded to include agricultural production as well.

Beginning in the mid 1960's, parallel with the development of monthly measures for all industries, an increasing attention was also given to converting the entire Gross Domestic Product by industry system to a monthly basis. In 1970, the project of developing conventions and methodologies for measuring monthly output of all industries was completed and the first monthly release covering the entire economy at a quite extensive industrial detail was published in 1971. At first, the monthly estimates were released approximately 3 months after the reference period, but by the end of 1972 timeliness improved from 90 to 60 days and with this the monthly output-based Gross Domestic Product became the timeliest indicator of current economic trends in Canada.

This report is intended to serve as a reference work for both beginner and established practitioners of economics who are interested in measuring Gross Domestic Product on an industry by industry basis. It replaces the last comprehensive documentation, which was published in 1963. Since then, although periodic attempts have been made to describe the numerous improvements in the estimation methods, a complete and detailed documentation of the enhancements has not been produced until now. While this document draws heavily from these previous sources, it extends the description to provide an overview of the present system.

This report was written by Erika Young under the guidance of Kishori Lal, former Associate Assistant Chief Statistician.

Ivan P. Fellegi
Chief Statistician of Canada