The Progressive Economics Forum

A few posts back, Marc Lee was discussing the Harper government’s sudden discovery of the dangers of global warming.  He mentioned in passing reports that the CAW was opposed to the idea of stronger emissions regulations for vehicles.  In fact the CAW has been in support of the Kyoto process, Canadian efforts to meet its [...]

We are still waiting for the Harper government’s proposed “green plan” or “clean air act” despite a big launch in Vancouver the other day. Expectations are being lowered as more details come out. The tough talking rhetoric does not appear to have much substance behind it. According to a CP wire story today based on [...]

The push for “competitiveness” is often framed around differences in corporate taxation. Our tax rates, it is argued, must be equivalent to or less than those of our competitors so that we can attract the investment we need to increase our standard of living. There is some truth to that in that if our taxes [...]

Just weeks ago it was Telus that was the biggest ever conversion to an income trust. Now BCE jumps to the top. This mania for income trusts has me wondering how the rash of conversions from corporate entities to income trusts can make good economic sense. Income trusts are clearly a vehicle by which corporate [...]

Jim Stanford and Stephen Gordon are keeping me busy today. Another missive from Jim Stanford in the Globe prompted this post from Stephen that leads to some interesting points of comparison between the Nordic model and the Canadian status quo: Welfare states can be competitive Jim Stanford sets aside our shared scepticism about the WEF [...]

The prospect of a free trade deal with South Korea has set off a mini-debate at Stephen Gordon’s Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. Jim Stanford’s column in the Globe prompted this post from Stephen: Mercantilism at the Globe and Mail Courtesy of Jim Stanford: Why the rush to ink more deals? Where free trade is concerned, Canada [...]

Kudos to Norway, already a leader in foreign aid as a share of GDP, for cancelling the bilateral debts of five poor nations. The amount of money is not huge, so one might ask why it has taken this long – the 2000 Jubilee campaign might have been a better time. From the story below, [...]

The 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Edmund Phelps. (Technically, this is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, because Nobel did not actually endow a prize in economics back in 1901; the economics prize was added in 1968.) The essay accompanying the prize can be found here. Below [...]

“We are not acquisitive automatons conditioned always to follow narrow self-interest.” So says the UK’s The Times in an article on “neuro-economics”, a sub-field of economics that bridges psychology and neurology in an attempt to understand human behaviour. Alas, rather than an empirical approach to human behaviour, the economics profession has been willing to make [...]

Against the backdrop of fears of a slowing economy, today’s job numbers for the month of September are superficially re-assuring. The national unemployment rate is down slightly, from 6.5% to 6.4%, and total employment is up by 16,000. However, the fall in the unemployment rate is partly driven by a decline in the total work-force. [...]

 This paper is a useful corrective to some of the more apocalyptic projections of looming generalized labour shortages in the US, Canada and elsewhere. One of Freeman’s key points is that we should not care about a decline of GDP growth, only about GDP per capita, and that we should focus more on increasing productivity [...]

Here’s a post from Economist’s View starting with a novel argument against single payer health insurance: that it would hurt innovation. Mark Thoma then rebuts and throws in some Paul Krugman for safe measure. Krugman makes an important point that often we assume that innovation is always a good thing. True, some innovations lead to [...]

Since it appears to be drug day at RPE, I should mention as a follow-up to a previous post on the National Pharmaceuticals Strategy that I did track down the document in question, a NPS Progress Report,  and that the Globe reporter did indeed misrepresent the estimates of the cost of that program. The Globe [...]

Today’s Globe and Mail features two excellent articles about drugs in Canada. The first makes some great points about what might be possible with a national pharmacare plan and how politics is getting in the way of doing the right thing. The second is about how profit-seeking by pharmaceutical companies is distorting the cost of [...]

A good piece from today’s Toronto Star by CCPA economist Ellen Russell on the erosion of federal fiscal capacity by recent tax cuts. Pressures to cut social spending are growing, compounded by a marked federal government shift to “security expenditure.” It’s a bit harder to figure out the best left response given that itt’s trickier [...]

The BC government has introduced a new program to address the crisis in housing affordability: rent supplements. Over the past five years, the BC government has stopped building affordable housing for low income people. There has been new federal money for this purpose but the government has used that money to build “assisted living” spaces [...]

“Canada’s New Government” says that it wants to focus on “the productivity agenda.” But they seem unable to look beyond partisan considerations to make the rather obvious link between investment in skills, and building a more productive economy. The previous Liberal government had just begun to slowly re-invest in worker training and adult learning after [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that someone ought to publish a comparative ranking of OECD countries by productivity per HOUR of work (rather than the more common, but utterly misleading, measure of GDP per capita). Turns out the Economic Policy Institute in Washington has done exactly that in their latest version of their [...]

I got a chuckle from the letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail that was a response to my recent column on the Harper government’s efforts to sign more free trade deals. Here is the letter: KEN RITTER CHAIR , BOARD OF DIRECTORS and CANADIAN WHEAT BOARD Winnipeg — Jim Stanford asks: Why [...]

Joseph Stiglitz takes on the matter of global imbalances with some thoughts on how they might be resolved. I confess to be perplexed by the persistence of these imbalances, as someone who was concerned about their potentially destabilizing impact a few year ago. But then again I called the stock market bubble back in 1997. [...]

Today’s report from the Fraser Institute finds that, surprise surprise, health care spending is unsustainable. Or at least that is what the Fraser’s funders want you to think. I find the Fraser Institute has an excellent knack for putting out media-friendly goodies that on closer examination do not stand up to scrutiny. But the media [...]

http://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/good_society/good_society.pdf Compass has just published the first of three short books in an attempt to redefine the social democratic project in the UK. Highly critical of New Labour but strongly influenced by Scandinavian social democracy, Compass is advancing themes and policies which will resonate on the progressive left in Canada – a relentless focus on [...]

The Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom looks at the choices we make that keep the poor, um, poor. Walkom looks only at the working poor, not the welfare poor. If we add to the pile the numerous regressive reforms to provincial welfare programs the picture is even uglier. There’s much we can do to combat poverty [...]

The Economist (September 21 Print Edition) runs an article “The Limits of Solidarity” which attacks US Democrats for favouring union-friendly legislation. It concludes as follows: “After all, trade unions have obvious drawbacks as well as modest attractions. Whenever they win their members higher wage rises than in non-unionised firms, this money has to come from [...]

File this one under the economic costs of climate change. If you have been to or flown over BC lately you will have noticed the astonishing amount of red (dying) pine trees. The mountian pine beetle is normally killed by cold cold winters, but winters now are not cold enough, and summers are just to [...]