Who benefits from surging immigration? Hint – it’s not Canadian workers: Tim Sargent in the Hub
Anyone who pays any attention to economic policy debates in Canada knows that our productivity performance in recent years has been disappointing—and that’s putting it politely. Carolyn Rogers, the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, put it more bluntly in a speech in March when she said that Canada faces a productivity “emergency” and it is “time to break the glass.”
Not only is productivity—how much output each worker produces in an hour—not growing, but it is actually falling. As Figure 1 shows, Canadian productivity is lower now than it was in mid-2022 when the economy was coming out of COVID. Compare that to the United States, which has seen robust productivity growth since COVID and is now back to its pre-pandemic trend.
Graphic credit: Janice Nelson.
Canada’s poor productivity record comes with real costs for ordinary Canadians in the form of lower wages and living standards than in the U.S. The growing Canada-U.S. labour productivity gap is now 30 percent and that manifests itself in $20,000 less in GDP per capita for Canadians relative to Americans.
However, one area where Canada leads not just the U.S. but the developed world is population growth. As StatsCan reported in March, the Canadian population grew by 3.2 percent in 2023, blasting through the 40 million barrier to 40.8 million. This increase was the largest in percentage terms since 1957 when there was an influx of Hungarian refugees following the 1956 uprising. As Figure 2 shows, Canada’s population growth in 2023 was much higher than any other G7 country, much higher than the U.K. with 0.8 percent growth and the U.S. with 0.5 percent growth. Indeed, Canada’s population growth is more on a par with West African countries like Mali or Chad where women typically have five or six children.
Pour lire l’article au complet, cliquez ici.
Source: MLI, Tim Sargent, Août 2024.
Réponses