Description
The Alberta economy has been undergoing massive structural changes in recent years with the development of the oil sands. The importance of the mining and oil and gas industry has increased substantially from 24.9 per cent of nominal business sector GDP in 1997 to 38.6 per cent in 2008, while the share of business sector hours worked in the industry experienced a much more modest increase from 7.5 per cent in 1997 to 8.5 per cent in 2008. This development has important implications for the province's productivity performance. The objective of this report is to provide a detailed analysis of productivity developments in Alberta from a growth accounting perspective using a unique data set constructed by Statistics Canada. The data in this report are based on the updated CSLS Provincial Productivity Database, which now contains level and growth rate estimates of labour, capital and multifactor productivity at the two-digit NAICS level to 2010.2 The estimates in this report supersede an...