Canadian Public Policy – Special Issue on the Canada-U.S. Unemployment Rate Gap – Archival Record (Table of Contents and Introduction)

From Canada’s viewpoint, one of the most important labour market developments of the 1980s and 1990s was the divergence of the Canadian and American unemployment rates after 1981. In 1995 the newly established Centre for the Study of Living Standards initiated a research project on the Canada-US unemployment rate gap, bringing together labour economists from both countries; this special issue of Canadian Public Policy was the outcome, containing revised versions of papers presented at a conference co-sponsored by the Canadian Employment Research Forum and held in Ottawa on February 9-10, 1996. A key finding is that the gap of the 1980s and its further widening in the 1990s had fundamentally different underlying causes: the 1980s gap was principally due to a change in how Canadians and Americans spend, or at least report, their time when not working, rather than to a relative decline in Canadian employment, while the 1990s widening was principally due to Canada’s much weaker aggregate economic growth and the consequent steep relative decline in employment.