In the US economy, the employment to population ratio (16 and older) has declined from 64.3 percent in 1999 to 59.7 percent in 2016 (4.6 percentage points decline) and some researchers have attributed this decline to the increase import competition from China and the increase use of robots in industrial production during the time period. For a background on the arguments you can read the column: “The secular decline in US employment over the past two decades,” by Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa Kearney in VoxEU, https://voxeu.org/article/secular-decline-us-employment-over-past-two-decades.

1. Discuss in a maximum of 400 words (excluding the list of references) whether you agree or not that the same factors are playing a role in the decline in the employment to population ratio in Canada between 2008 and 2018. In constructing your argument, try to use the observations from the disaggregated data in the previous section. You can also use media or academic literature as well as other data in support of your arguments but make sure to acknowledge these sources with appropriate references.