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The Relevance of the Wheat Boom in Canadian Economic Growth. The wheat boom was regarded as the most convincing demonstration of the usefulness of the staple theory in Canadian economic history but Chambers and Cordon (1966) demonstrated that in 1901-11 it contributed at most only 8.4 per cent of the growth in per capita income. On their own grounds, because of empirical errors, the contribution was actually 20 per cent Other factors, ignored in their model, raised the contribution of the wheat boom both in the shorter period, 1901-11, and in the longer period, 1901-20/21, to between 24 and 30 per cent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the two economies knows, the United States has enjoyed and does enjoy a substantial advantage over Canada in terms of what used to be called economic welfare. Many of us would not spend much time studying economics if we did not think that economic welfare, even if only measurable In a rough way, was of some importance. On the other hand, all of us and here we would have the support of eminent economists from Adam Smith to Dennis Robertson would be prepared to argue that some things may be more important than opulence. Perhaps if we could broaden our concept of welfare to include political, legal, religious and other aspects of well-being, a comparison between the United States and Canada might yield a different answer. There are some grounds for thinking that there has been a similar divergence in the rates of growth of real national product, but much work needs to be done before we can speak with much confidence. The American literature quite rightly draws attention to some of the difficulties associated with falling prices during parts of the period, but it is also recognized that these were decades of very rapid economic growth, which in a single generation brought the American economy from a position of parity with the economies of other industrial powers to a position of world leadership. In Canadian economic history on the other hand, the period 1870-1900 gets an almost uniformly bad press. tries.