This article originally appeared in the Financial Post. Below is an excerpt from the article.
By Jack Mintz, November 20, 2023
Last week, I wrote about Canada’s poor economic performance over the past five years compared to the United States and other industrialized countries. To recap, Canada’s standard of living has been becalmed, “as a painted ship upon a paint ocean.” Sure, we went through a bad year with the pandemic in 2020. So did other countries. Yet, we fell behind. Over the last five years, as our growth stalled, U.S. per capita GDP grew 9.3 per cent, the OECD average 5.6 per cent, resource-rich Australia 4.8 per cent and Ireland an astonishing 31 per cent.
According to IMF statistics, our share of world GDP (in purchasing-power-parity dollars), has fallen six per cent, from 1.44 per cent in 2018 to 1.36 per cent in 2023. We shouldn’t even be a G7 country anymore: in PPP dollars our economy is only the world’s 16th biggest, right behind Spain.
But that’s the past. What about the future? In 2021, the OECD projected that our economy would perform worse this decade than all other member countries, with per capita real GDP growing only 0.7 per cent annually — though at least that would be an improvement over the past five years. The big question is why Canada is at the bottom of the heap…
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