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The Engine or the Caboose? Resource Industries and Twentieth-Century Canadian Economic Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2007

Ian Keay
Ian Keay
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Economics and School of Environmental Studies, Queen's University, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada. E-mail: ikeay@econ.queensu.ca.
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Abstract

The Canadian economy, already wealthy, diverse, and relatively industrial at the dawn of the twentieth century, had not yet outgrown its reliance on resource-intensive production. Empirical evidence indicates that the exploitation of Canada's natural resource endowment made direct and indirect contributions to the size and efficiency of the twentieth-century domestic economy. I conclude that the concentration of capital and labor in resource industries did not constrain the rate of change of Canadian real GNP per capita between 1900 and 1999, and it appears to have had a substantial positive impact on the level of real GNP per capita.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 67 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 1 - 32
Copyright
© 2007 The Economic History Association

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