What The Heck Is Productivity, Anyway?

Stop me if you've heard this before: Canada has a productivity problem. You can't open up the business news without reading dire warnings about what's going to happen to the country if we don't improve our productivity. But what is productivity, anyway? What does it mean for an economy to be more or less productive? How does it affect regular people? Should we even care about this metric? And if so, what can we really do to improve it?

William Huggins, a lecturer on corporate finance, economics, and statistics at the DeGroote School of Business, joins us to answer:

• What productivity is and how we measure it.
• Why productivity matters for the economy.
• Why wages have become disconnected from productivity.
• Why Canada's productivity is lagging behind other developed countries.
• How some countries without many natural economic advantages have supercharged their productivity.
• What Canada can do to boost our productivity, and what it would mean for our economy.

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