Hard working province

While Nova Scotia’s economic output per person was gaining on the rest of the country, the productivity of the workforce – the amount of output for each hour worked – was also increasing. [...] Such factors include the amount of capital and the level of technology, the value-added in the products, and the level of education, training, and skill among the workers chosen to do the work. [...] This is typified by Stephen Harper’s infamous words in 2002, “There is a dependence in the region that breeds a culture of defeatism.”4 The lower productivity levels in Nova Scotia are related to the structure of the province’s economy. [...] The series from 1991 appears to show higher earnings than the previous series, but this effect comes mainly from different methods of calculating.14 That is to say, workers are in reality no richer from one data series to the other, simply, the average reported for the province is different because of changes in the statistical methods used to compute it. [...] It is a common mistake to confuse the growth in productivity in the region, roughly comparable to that of the whole coun- try (Figure 2), with the fact that in absolute terms, productivity in Nova Scotia re- mains below the Canadian average.