Paul Martin's Business Update - November 27th

Nov 27, 2013, 07:53 PM

Paul Martin's Business Update - November 27th

When a report from Statistics Canada came out just over a week ago with a downward revision of the province’s economic performance last year more than a few eyebrows were raised.

The revision pushed Saskatchewan into fourth place among the provinces in terms of growth in GDP which is the primary measure of economic output. We came in at just under 2 per cent.

These figures, however, can be somewhat deceptive without some context. Among the best at providing that is the editorial team at SaskTrends Monitor, the best tracker of all things Saskatchewan. They used the new figure as the trigger to draw a five-year line – looking at economic growth from 2007 to 2012. Included in that is the Great Recession. And what they found is that the average over that period was 2.3 per cent growth in Saskatchewan. This is important because woven into all of this is the fact that StatsCan has revised the way it calculates the GDP number.

The 2.3 percent figure exceeds our 2.0 per cent historical growth rate and, perhaps most importantly, it was tops in the nation over that period.

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