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This article provides information about the Canadian Economy!
The best way to describe the Canadian economy is to examine what kind of goods and services they produce and consume, what sort of jobs they do, how much they earn, and whom they work for and trade with. Canadians have long been famous to themselves as “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, and the country’s development was initially motivated by a desire to exploit the country’s natural resources.
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At the same time, it is also true that while the resource industries still account for a significant share of overall economic activity, in Canada, as in other developed countries, most output is produced in the manufacturing and service sectors.
In 1997 manufacturing accounted for 18% of overall Canadian output, while agriculture and the resource industries – forestry, fishing and trapping, mining and petroleum, and electric power, gas and water – together accounted for under 15%. Canada has a larger service sector and smaller manufacturing sector. In 1997, 73% of workers were employed in the service sector, with 15.5% in manufacturing and only 5.1 % in agriculture and natural resources.
Another way to describe Canadian economic activity is to look at the kinds and amounts of work Canadians do, not at what they produce. The distinction between what is produced and the type of work done to produce it is often forgotten but, of course, is crucial. Moreover, mechanisation has also resulted in the number of direct production workers. The number of Canadians who actually hew, draw, drill or farm for a living is minuscule, while 7 out of 10 Canadians now work in white-collar occupations.
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At the same time, there has been a dramatic increase in the rate of participation – from 55% in 1946 to 64.8% in 1997, which is mainly due to the participation of women into the labour force. The female participation rate increased from 24.7% to 57.5% while the male rate declined from 85.1 % to 72.5%, the main factors responsible for this increased rate of female participation are — improved methods of birth- control, the invention of labour-saving home appliances, change in attitudes, the growth of public sector, etc.
But the participation-rate has been less successful in checking the unemployment rate that has risen from an average of 5.2% in the 1960s to 6.7% in the 1970s, to 9.9% between 1980 and 1986. These are two main factors responsible for rise in unemployment rate.
On the one hand, it is believed that due to unemployment insurance programme, many people prefer to undergo “periodic spells of unemployment”, and that there are many more secondary workers – women and young people, mainly – who presumably are not as desperate for employment as was the archetypical worker of the 1950s, the male head of a household in which no one else earned an income.
On the other hand, “the unemployment rate for prime-age males has also been creeping up over the last 2 decades”. But from 1996, the unemployment rate has been decreasing from 9.6% in 1996, 9.1 % in 1997 to 7.6% in 2003. Education plays the important role in the development of individuals and society, of empowering people, enhancing their decision-making power.
It is known that the level of education influences the types of jobs people obtain and the income they receive. As per the 2001 census, people with a bachelor’s degree were more likely to have higher earnings than high school graduates. Another trend was also observed related to education. As more and more jobs required post-secondary education, young men and women became more likely to v tend their stay in parent’s home, and delay marriage and starting their own families.
Data from the Census show that Canadians have continued to upgrade their education in order to get good jobs to support themselves and their families. It is not surprising that the Canadian population now enjoys better education than ever and Canada ranks highest among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the proportion of its working-age population with college and university education combined. In addition to work-force, education, job-opportunities, etc., there are other indicators which determine the living standards or economic growth of any country.