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This article analyses regional resilience to economic shock in Canada from 1987 to 2012, a period that included severe recessions and major free-trade agreements. Employment is cross-tabulated by region, industry and gender and partitioned cumulatively using three-way multifactor partitioning for each period from 1987–1988 to 1987–2012. Employment loss in each recession is found to be more closely associated with industry-mix in the preceding growth period than with the region effect. At each recession, manufacturing had much bigger employment losses and a much weaker recovery than business services. Thus manufacturing amplifies economic shocks, while business services act as regional shock absorbers. Manufacturing employment decline in Ontario was influenced by trade liberalization and far exceeds what would be expected from the industry and region effects alone. Female employment growth outpaced male employment growth in every region and in every industry group apart from business and appeared to be more resilient to recession. But corrected for their industry composition and regional disparities, these gender differences are substantially reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates if conclusions regarding labour market hysteresis differ depending on whether employment or unemployment rates are studied. Applying a range of unit-root tests to monthly data from Australia, Austria, Canada, Finland, Sweden, the UK and the USA, we find results for employment rates that contrast those based on unemployment rates. In particular, rather than the mixed evidence for hysteresis found using unemployment rates, employment rates result in unequivocal evidence of hysteresis in Australia, Canada and the USA. These findings cast doubt on previous conclusions in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-memory univariate time series models, known as ARFIMA, are applied to measure shock persistence for Canada and the USA. Both output and unemployment exhibit higher persistence in Canada than in the USA. The finding that the rate of unemployment in Canada exhibits high shock persistence supports the notion of hysteresis in unemployment. The analysis of disaggregated Canadian unemployment rates indicates that hysteresis is most pronounced for adult male workers. The same class of models is used to obtain a generalization of the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition of time series into a permanent and a cyclical component. The permanent component of the Canadian unemployment rate exhibits a kink in the early 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]