Measurement of Canadian agricultural productivity growth.

This chapter describes in some detail the methods and data used by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) to construct the production and productivity accounts for Canadian agriculture. Like the USDA, they use gross output rather than value added (which subtracts the value of intermediate inputs from gross output) as the measure of agricultural output. As a result, inputs of intermediate goods, obviously crucial to agricultural production, are treated symmetrically with capital and labour inputs. The authors estimate that gross output expanded at a 2.3% average annual rate over the 1961-2006 period, while aggregate input growth averaged just 0.7% annually. Thus, productivity growth, at 1.6% per year, was the principal source of economic growth of the Canadian farm sector, and its contribution has remained fairly steady over time.