A Comparison Of Job Creation And Job Destruction In Canada And The United States

In recent years a growing number of countries have constructed data series on job creation and job destruction using establishment-level data sets. This paper provides a description and detailed comparison of these new data series for the United States and Canada. First, the Canadian and U.S. industry-level job creation and destruction data are remarkably similar. Industries with high (low) job creation in the United States are evidenced by high (low) job creation in Canada. The same is true for job destruction. In addition, the overall magnitudes of gross job flows in the two countries are comparable. Second, the time-series patterns of creation and destruction are qualitatively similar but do differ in a number of important respects. In both countries, job destruction is much more cyclically volatile than job creation. This cyclical asymmetry is, however, more pronounced in the United States. In addition, the pace of job reallocation exhibits a pronounced upward trend in Canada but is essentially trendless in the United States. © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology