Impact of Advanced Technology Use on Firm Performance in the Canadian Food Processing Sector

This chapter investigates the evolution of industrial structure in the Canadian food processing sector and its relationship to technological change. It uses a dataset combining advanced technology use that is derived from a 1998 special survey on advanced technology use in the food sector that is linked to data on firm performance derived from administrative records covering the period 1988-1997. The chapter first examines the characteristics of firms (size, nationality, emphasis given to training, innovativeness) that adopt advanced technologies and then how the use of these technologies is related to plant performance (growth in productivity and market share). Plants that adopted more advanced technologies enjoyed superior productivity growth. Process control and network communications technologies are particularly important to productivity growth in the foodprocessing sector. Those plants that increased their relative productivity growth and used more advanced technologies saw their market share increase...

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