IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sls/resrep/1303.html

Can the Canada-U.S. ICT Gap be a Measurement Issue?

Author

Listed:
  • Andrew Sharpe

  • Vikram Rai

Abstract

In 2011, business sector investment per worker in information and communications technology (ICT) in Canada was only 57.8 per cent of the U.S. level, indicating an ICT investment per worker gap of 42.2 percentage points. Numerous explanations have been advanced to explain this gap, one of which is that the ICT investment data from Statistics Canada and the Bureau of Economic Analysis are not strictly comparable. The primary focus of this report is to analyze that hypothesis. We compare the methodology used to measure ICT investment in Canada and the United States and find that issues related to measurement account for approximately 4 percentage points (10 per cent) of the gap. Although software investment has been responsible for 90 per cent of the gap in recent years, seven out of 17 industries in Canada actually had greater investment per worker levels than the United States in both total ICT and software. A small number of ICT-intensive industries has been responsible for a substantial part of the gap. In particular, information and cultural industries accounted for 39.1 per cent of the total gap. This supports the conclusion that the Canada-U.S. ICT investment per worker gap is largely the result of industry-specific factors which affect software investment.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew Sharpe & Vikram Rai, 2013. "Can the Canada-U.S. ICT Gap be a Measurement Issue?," CSLS Research Reports 2013-03, Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
    • Handle: RePEc:sls:resrep:1303
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.csls.ca/reports/csls2013-03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Baldwin, John R. Macdonald, Ryan, 2009. "PPPs: Purchasing Power or Producing Power Parities?," Economic Analysis (EA) Research Paper Series 2009058e, Statistics Canada, Analytical Studies Branch.
    2. Atkinson, A. B. & Stiglitz, J. E., 1976. "The design of tax structure: Direct versus indirect taxation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 6(1-2), pages 55-75.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jasmin Thomas, 2016. "New Evidence on the Canada-U.S. ICT Investment Gap, 1976-2014 Selected OECD Countries, 1986-2013," CSLS Research Reports 2016-17, Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
    2. Jasmin Thomas, 2016. "Explaining Industry Differences in IT Investment Per Worker Between Canada and the United States, 2002-2013," CSLS Research Reports 2016-01, Centre for the Study of Living Standards.
    3. Don Drummond & Evan Capeluck & Matthew Calver, 2015. "The Key Challenge for Canadian Public Policy: Generating Inclusive and Sustainable Economic Growth," CSLS Research Reports 2015-11, Centre for the Study of Living Standards.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hellwig, Christian & Werquin, Nicolas, 2022. "A Fair Day's Pay for a Fair Day's Work: Optimal Tax Design as Redistributional Arbitrage," CEPR Discussion Papers 16863, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    2. Jing Xing, 2011. "Does tax structure affect economic growth? Empirical evidence from OECD countries," Working Papers 1120, Oxford University Centre for Business Taxation.
    3. Alan J. Auerbach, 2006. "The Future of Capital Income Taxation," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 27(4), pages 399-420, December.
    4. Hanming Fang & Peter Norman, 2014. "Toward an efficiency rationale for the public provision of private goods," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 56(2), pages 375-408, June.
    5. Lagadec, Gael & Descombels, Alain, 2009. "L'ombre de la crise [The shadow of the global crisis]," MPRA Paper 17871, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Bas Jacobs, 2013. "Optimal redistributive tax and education policies in general equilibrium," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 20(2), pages 312-337, April.
    7. Börjesson, Maria & Asplund, Disa & Hamilton, Carl, 2021. "Optimal kilometre tax for electric passenger cars," Working Papers 2021:3, Swedish National Road & Transport Research Institute (VTI).
    8. Blomquist, Soren & Micheletto, Luca, 2006. "Optimal redistributive taxation when government's and agents' preferences differ," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 90(6-7), pages 1215-1233, August.
    9. Johann K. Brunner & Susanne Pech, 2013. "Taxing Bequests and Consumption in the Steady State," CESifo Working Paper Series 4453, CESifo.
    10. Piero Gottardi & Atsushi Kajii & Tomoyuki Nakajima, 2015. "Optimal Taxation and Debt with Uninsurable Risks to Human Capital Accumulation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 105(11), pages 3443-3470, November.
    11. Heinz Welsch, 2024. "Household Sector Carbon Pricing, Revenue Rebating, and Subjective Well-Being: A Dollar is not a Dollar," Working Papers V-444-24, University of Oldenburg, Department of Economics, revised Apr 2024.
    12. Louis Kaplow, 2010. "Optimal Control of Externalities in the Presence of Income Taxation," STICERD - Public Economics Programme Discussion Papers 02, Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines, LSE.
    13. European Commission, 2013. "Tax reforms in EU Member States - Tax policy challenges for economic growth and fiscal sustainability – 2013 Report," Taxation Papers 38, Directorate General Taxation and Customs Union, European Commission.
    14. Findeisen, Sebastian & Sachs, Dominik, 2014. "Efficient Labor and Capital Income Taxation over the Life Cycle," Working Papers 14-17, University of Mannheim, Department of Economics.
    15. Firouz Gahvari & Luca Micheletto, 2019. "Heterogeneity, monetary policy, Mirrleesian taxes, and the Friedman rule," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 67(4), pages 983-1018, June.
    16. Ester Faia & Wolfgang Lechthaler & Christian Merkl, 2014. "Labor Selection, Turnover Costs, and Optimal Monetary Policy," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(1), pages 115-144, February.
    17. Findeisen, Sebastian & Sachs, Dominik, 2017. "Redistribution and insurance with simple tax instruments," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 58-78.
    18. Maitreesh Ghatak & François Maniquet, 2019. "Universal Basic Income: Some Theoretical Aspects," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 11(1), pages 895-928, August.
    19. Richter, Wolfram F., 2009. "Taxing education in Ramsey's tradition," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(11-12), pages 1254-1260, December.
    20. Spencer Bastani & Sören Blomquist & Luca Micheletto, 2013. "The Welfare Gains Of Age‐Related Optimal Income Taxation," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 54, pages 1219-1249, November.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sls:resrep:1303. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CSLS The email address of this maintainer does not seem to be valid anymore. Please ask CSLS to update the entry or send us the correct address (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cslssca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.