Reports

This paper first presents a meta-analysis of the causal impact of cultural participation on well-being. The meta-analysis classifies the literature according to the strength of the evidence available and various types of cultural activities. Secondly, this paper uses data from time use surveys from Canada, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States to study individuals’ emotional responses to a series of daily activities. This is then used as a basis for an empirical assessment of the drivers of time allocation across different activities, showing that expectations of future well-being are one of the reasons why individuals decide to engage in cultural activities. Furthermore, the model helps explain why cultural participation, in spite of being one of the most enjoyable human activities, is also the least undertaken. We show that heterogeneity of preferences results in a strong selection effect in available statistics.

Innovation is broader than science and technology, yet often statistics and government programmes narrowly focus on this type of innovation. In rural places, this is particularly relevant as not all firms have the capacity to be competitive in high-tech innovation. With around one in five Canadians living in Canada’s rural regions, better understanding how to promote broader notions of innovation for rural places by increasing entrepreneurship, including for women, advancing the green transition, and improving the provision of services is critical to boost rural productivity, and increase well-being standards. The report sets the scene for rural innovation in Canada, explores the policy and governance environment for key regional innovation initiatives, and includes a special topic chapter on green innovation in rural regions of Canada.

This paper estimates the data intensity of occupations/sectors (i.e. the share of job postings per occupation/sector related to the production of data) using natural language processing (NLP) on job advertisements in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Online job advertisement data collected by Lightcast provide timely and disaggregated insights into labour demand and skill requirements of different professions. The paper makes three major contributions. First, indicators created from the Lightcast data add to the understanding of digital skills in the labour market. Second, the results may advance the measurement of data assets in national account statistics. Third, the NLP methodology can handle up to 66 languages and can be adapted to measure concepts beyond digital skills. Results provide a ranking of data intensity across occupations, with data analytics activities contributing most to aggregate data intensity shares in all three countries. At the sectoral level, the emerging picture is more heterogeneous across countries. Differences in labour demand primarily explain those variations, with low data-intensive professions contributing most to aggregate data intensity in the United Kingdom. Estimates of investment in data, using a sum of costs approach and sectoral intensity shares, point to lower levels in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.

This report examines Alberta's labour market trends, focusing on the impact of economic downturns, the COVID-19 crisis, and digital transformation. This study uses real-time labour market data, drawn from online job postings, to offer a granular perspective on demand dynamics across various sectors and occupations. The analysis in the report identifies emerging labour shortages in Alberta due to mega-trends such as digitalisation, AI adoption, automation, and population ageing and discusses key challenges such as youth unemployment and sector-specific labour shortages. The analysis in this report provides insights for policy makers, suggesting a need to support growing sectors, enhance digital skills development, address demand for health workers, and improve youth job access.

Canada has an ambitious plan to reduce the economy’s net emissions to zero by 2050. This will require a step change in mitigation action, with deep energy savings and near economy-wide replacement of fossil fuels with clean energy. Achieving this while minimising negative impacts on activity and living standards will be challenging. Canada is already using a range of policy instruments to propel its green transition – including carbon pricing, regulations, investment incentives, and public procurement of green technology. This Paper explores reforms that could make climate policies work better together to lock in both deep emissions reductions and strong economic growth. As with important efforts to prepare communities for the impacts of climate change, Canada’s provinces and territories will play a key role in the country’s green transition.

Le Québec aspire à devenir le leader de l'innovation et de l'entrepreneuriat en Amérique du Nord et, pour cela, s'appuie sur les établissements d'enseignement supérieur (EES) qui ont un rôle central dans cette démarche. Les EES permettent le développement des compétences et l'épanouissement des talents, tout en créant de nouveaux liens avec leurs communautés - notamment avec le secteur privé, les pouvoirs publics et la société civile. La Stratégie québécoise de recherche et d’investissement en innovation (SQRI) place les EES au cœur des efforts provinciaux réalisés en matière d'innovation et d'entrepreneuriat, grâce notamment à une approche spatiale explicite à travers les 'zones d'innovation'. La présente étude évalue la 'géographie de l'enseignement supérieur' au Québec à travers dix études de cas d'EES innovants et engagés dans le soutien à l'entrepreneuriat et à l'innovation dans leurs communautés. L’analyse montre aussi dans quelle mesure les EES québécois soutiennent l’entrepreneuriat, l'innovation, la mise en relation entre acteurs, ainsi que la mobilisation de ressources et d'acteurs politiques. Des recommandations politiques implémentables sont proposées afin de continuer à développer cette dynamique.

This paper analyses Memorial University’s contribution to the economic development of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, specifically focusing on the university’s contributions to the provincial ocean economy. It analyses the university’s public engagement, entrepreneurship, and collaboration strategies, programs, and relationships to understand Memorial’s regional impact.

The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language communication but also create new threats because of persisting low levels of accuracy and quality in the translation output. The paper uses data on online job vacancies to map the evolution of the demand for language professionals between 2015 and 2019 in 10 countries and illustrates the set of skills that are considered important by employers seeking to hire language professionals through job vacancies posted on line.