Ch.5 Weak output, strong hiring puzzle Stats Can

http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/printedition/story.html?id=e07c2af1-3a01-4513-977f-d2c0290c5270&p=1

This article is all about employment and how there is a task force to find how the economic output can be so weak while hiring is so strong. This is a puzzling question and I couldn’t find a goo answer to it myself. Phillip Cross, director of current analysis at Stats Can, said the task force held its first meeting on Tuesday and hopes to report in a month or so. This task force could lead to many answers that people have which is a great thing for people like me and you. However, governor of the Bank of Canada, David Dodge, suggested that this may be because the gross domestic product (GDP) might not be accurately reflecting economic growth in Canada, seeing as growth is difficult to measure as prices fluctuate. It is easy to see large employment growth in sectors like health care, and natural resources, but it is difficult to measure output. Output takes time to become significant which also, makes it hard to measure. There are many problems that occur when we try measuring which slows down this process. This all led to Phillip Cross being puzzled and he said, “The task force is going to look at the GDP’s “measurement of output, employment and productivity across the economy.”

This article is related to this chapter because chapter 5 deals with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics is what GDP basically falls into because it is about individual statistics in Canada. In this article they also talked about employment and how the economy is run because of it. They talked about some issues which involved employment. This article asked the question of how the economic output can be so weak while the hiring is so strong. This confused a lot of people but it related to employment and the employment rate. On employment, they discussed the sectors where employment has been increasing, and the effect it had on GDP. For example, the article pointed out that the employment was “up 10.9% year-over year in December” in the natural resources sector, “while productivity in . . . new oil and gas wells” has declined, affecting GDP negatively. All in all it was relevant in many ways and it gave me a visual image of employment rates.

This article was very intriguing to me because I wanted to find out why weak economical output could occur with strong hiring. I believe that this is a confusing question for many political party leaders. I believe a low GDP rate isn’t good for a current business and those people who want to own one because this results in fewer new job positions. I like the fact that the employment is high because this results in more job opportunities for me and other high school or post secondary students. However, this trend may take a complete turn and in the future when I and many other people are looking for careers, won’t be able to find the right one because of the unemployment rate. In conclusion, there are still many questions to be answered like will the task force be able to find out the reason for low growth rate of Canada's GDP and be able to correct it?