Abstract
"Productivity is our economic destiny," says Andrew Sharpe, Director of the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in Canada. Productivity is indeed important because it is related to the level of living standards (defined as GDP per capita) and the economic well-being of a specific country. As a result, when productivity rises, both factors rise accordingly. The most common measure used to calculate a country's productivity and its economic performances is the labor productivity, measured in terms of the output per hours worked, which in turn evaluates the effectiveness of the country's firms. A recent study by The Canadian Productivity Review suggests that "since the early 1980s, the U.S labor productivity growth has exceeded Canadian growth and the gap has particularly widened after 2000?. The purpose of this essay is therefore not to prove that the Canadian productivity lags behind that of the U.S, but to present and examine the most reasonable explanations for this phenomenon. It is interesting to specifically analyze the post-2000 period, during which the gap has significantly widened.
