Paper - Bound by the Laws of Growth? A Long-Term Global Perspective on Canada’s Economic Performance

It sets the pace of the peloton but As illustrated in the chart, the GDP growth rates of the US, Canada, cannot halt the diffusion of innovation to other economies. [...] With few the G-7, and the OECD countries as a group are remarkably tightly and relatively minor exceptions, the other members of the peloton correlated, with deviations reflecting country-specific factors that have not been able to leapfrog the broad-based first-mover posi- tend to be of relatively short duration—e.g., the effect of the fall, tion of the US. [...] But the motivation to reflects the product of several factors: the fraction of the population keep pedaling hard appears to be rooted in the institutional quali- of labour force age; the labour force participation rate; the unemploy- ties that enable a society to join the peloton in the first place. [...] Since 2010, the change in the employment The persistence of the close correlation of growth rates of the ratio has favoured the US—the falling blue line. [...] (The chart is based on data from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.) 8 The growth rate of the product of two factors (A*B) is equal to the sum of the growth rates of A and B.