Preface

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The Canadian Productivity Review contains papers that facilitate an understanding of productivity in Canada. Most papers deal with the recent past. But an understanding of the present is often facilitated by information on the past. Accompanying papers in this series examine the relative Canada/US total factor productivity in the late 1990s and post 2000. This paper examines the relative levels of MFP in 1929.

Cross country comparisons of productivity are difficult to make because the data that are collected by different countries often comes from different sources or are derived from different methodologies. This study makes use of a set of matched industrial data taken from the 1929 Censuses of the two countries. Because of long standing interaction between the statistical establishments in Canada and the United States, the concepts and definitions in the two censuses are quite similar. Even so, one of the greatest problems in estimating cross-country MFP estimates is provided by finding usable capital stock data. This problem was resolved in this study using detailed data on the horsepower of the capital stock in the two countries and several other alternatives that were checked for internal consistency.

This paper was started when John Baldwin was still a member of the Department of Economics at Queen's University. Support from the SSHRC for the project is gratefully acknowledged. It was first presented at a conference of economic historians at Bellagio in Italy and more recently reworked. The authors are grateful to comments received from reviewers and colleagues.