indicatorThe Owl

Beyond the city walls

Rural business outlook, Third Quarter, 2021

By Rob Roach, ATB Economics 21 October 2021 1 min read

We don’t often get data specific to rural areas, so it’s great to see a new (albeit brief) report from Statistics Canada examining the future expectations of rural* Canadian businesses. (Provincial statistics are not cited in the report.)

 

Short-term concerns

Based on information gathered between July 2 to August 6, 2021, the report shows that 45.1% of rural businesses view the rising cost of inputs as an obstacle over the next three months.

“The next three most common short-term obstacles rural businesses cited in the third quarter were recruiting skilled employees (37.6%), labour force shortages (33.9%) and cost of insurance (33.1%).”

At 64.7%, concern regarding labour force shortages was most common among accommodation and food services businesses.

Working from home

 

About 20% rural businesses plan to have some or all of their employees primarily working from home after the pandemic with the other 80% planning on having no employees working remotely.

The urban ratio leans a bit more toward working from home at about 30% planning to have some or all employees primarily working from home versus 70% at the place of business or job site.

*Using Statistics Canada’s Standard Geographical Classification (SGC) 2016, businesses located in either census metropolitan areas (CMAs) or census agglomerations (CAs) are classified as “urban” and all others as “rural.”

Answer to the previous trivia question: With a monthly inflation rate of 41.9 quadrillion percent (41,900,000,000,000,000%), prices in Hungary in July 1946 doubled about every 15 hours.

Today’s trivia question: What is “shrinkflation?”

Almost half of rural businesses view the rising cost of inputs as an obstacle

Almost half of rural businesses view the rising cost of inputs as an obstacle


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