Is There Evidence of ICT Skill Shortages in Canadian Taxfiler Data?

Productivity and growth may be affected by what are called “shortages” of specific types of workers. We examine Canadian data for evidence of a shortage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) workers. Published vacancy and unemployment data is too coarse at the industry level. Accordingly we use two types of administrative data to look for evidence of rising ICT employment and labour income which might indicate a shortage. One dataset is available with little lag in cross section (from payroll records) and the other longitudinal dataset (based on taxfiler data) is available with a 2-year lag. Our results suggest that both data sources may be useful in this instance, with the longitudinal data used to check for compositional changes in the more timely cross section data. Similar approaches may be available for other countries. These data sources provide at most mild evidence of a shortage of Canadian ICT workers in recent times.