Canadian Business Economics: A Symposium on Canadian Labour Force Participation in the 1990s

A major development in the Canadian labour market in the 1990s was the decline in labour force participation, with important implications for living standards and for the conduct of macroeconomic policy. This issue of Canadian Business Economics consists of a symposium on that decline. The idea came out of a December 1997 workshop organised by the Canadian Employment Research Forum; the CSLS and Human Resources Development Canada then organised two sessions on declining participation at the 1998 Canadian Economics Association meetings, where these papers were first presented before being refereed and revised. After peaking at 67.5 per cent in 1989, the aggregate participation rate of the population aged 15 and over fell continually to a trough of 64.8 per cent in 1997. The six articles attempt to explain that 2.7 percentage point decline, identifying both structural factors — the levelling of cohort effects in female participation, rising school enrolment, and the growing share of the population aged 65 and over — and cyclical ones.