Review of Best Practices in Labour Market Forecasting with an Application to the Canadian Aboriginal Population

At this stage of the feasibility report, the main tasks include assessing the scope and quality of urban Aboriginal labour market supply and demand information in Canada and reviewing the best practices of existing approaches to labour market supply and demand modeling. [...] The detailed descriptions of the COPS model presented in the next section prove useful for clarifying some of the more opaque aspects of the MRA. [...] Since the elasticity of substitution between different kinds of labour is a measurement of the relationship between the supply of workers across occupations, this assumption amounts to a belief that the “potential supply of workers in other occupations, even occupations requiring similar skill sets” is not important in the determination of future imbalances in a specific occupation (El Achkar, 201. [...] Both the Canadian Occupational Projection System (COPS) and the method used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics are examined in extreme detail in order to develop a very sound understanding of the steps of the MRA described above. [...] As these models have a strong foundation in the MRA, the detailed description of the COPS and the BLS model can act as a guide for unpacking the steps in the other models.