The Progressive Economics Forum

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070711.wcomment0712/BNStory/Front/home Asks Michael Mendelson from Caledon

The spirit of Paul Martin’s budgeting practices lives on at the BC Ministry of Finance. Today, Finance Minister Carole Taylor published the audited public accounts for 2006/07, with a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion surplus, the largest in provincial history. To put this in context, BC’s estimated GDP in 2006 was $179 billion, so the surplus amounts [...]

Benjamin Tal of CIBC produces a quarterly Canadian Employment Quality Index. The releases from today (July 11) and February 11 provide amazingly different spins on amazingly similar figures. The basic facts are virtually unchanged: - Most new employment has been self-employment as opposed to jobs paid by an employer. – Most new employment has been full-time [...]

Despite our protests on this blog, and Erin Weir chaining himself to the central staircase of the Bank of Canada, our hawks at the Bank raised interest rates today. That is, it raised the overnight rate by a quarter point to 4.5%. The Bank’s press release is a bit unusual in that there is no [...]

The OECD  have released a modestly interesting, highly empirical  report on the changing nature of the manufacturing sector in advanced industrial economies.  http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/17/37607831.pdf It speaks, somewhat tangentially, to the issue of whether “deindustrialization” should be of concern to policy-makers. As is well-known, the declining share of manufacturing employment has been pervasive across OECD countries since [...]

Further to my and David Green’s posts on the strange economics of temporary foreign workers .. http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/02/08/the-strange-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/ http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/06/28/the-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/  it is strking to observe that such workers are NOT overwhelmingly concentrated in the Western provinces with well below average unemployment rates. In fact, data presented to an Alberta consultation on the program by the Alberta Federation [...]

http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/sweden_unemployment_2007_06.pdf Right-wingers have countered social democratic citation of the Swedish model as a success by claiming that Sweden has high but hidden unemployment – a claim that recently helped defeat the Swedish social democrats. True, active labour market policies do provide a fair bit of government subsidized employment in Sweden, but, on the other hand [...]

In a number of areas of health care, the rapid advance of technology may pose challenges to public systems, as technology tends to increase to costs associated with care by expanding both the realm of the possible and the number of people who can avail themselves of it (I review some cases of this in [...]

One of the key contradictions of neo liberalism is between the ideology of free markets and limited government, and the reality that transnationals can and do seek to enhance their competitive position in the global order by presenting themselves to ‘their’ home states as champions of national economic development. This contradiction has been relatively subdued [...]

Today’s Globe and Mail (Report on Business, p. B4) reports that when (technically, if) BCE Inc goes private as a result of the sale to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan led group, interest-bearing debt will likely rise from $12 Billion to some $38 Billion, according to Chris Diceman of the Dominion Bond Rating Service.  That [...]

My assessment of today’s Labour Force Survey follows: Manufacturing Crisis Deepens • The loss of a further 31,000 manufacturing jobs in June pushed total manufacturing employment losses to 95,000 positions since the beginning of February 2007. Since employment in Canadian manufacturing peaked in November 2002, this sector has lost 308,000 jobs. Construction and Resource Employment [...]

  The Bank of Canada goes to great pains to tell us that they have only one goal – namely to keep inflation at the mid point of the 1-3% target range – and have no view on the appropriate exchange rate of the Canadian dollar except insofar as it relates to this one goal. [...]

Vancouver political scientist Peter Pronzos emailed this review of Michael Byers’ new book, Intent for a Nation: “…so close to the United States” By Peter Pronzos Book review of Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For? By Michael Byers Douglas & McIntyre, 248 pages, $32.95 When former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien bowed to public [...]

An interesting story in The Tyee that picks up on evidence from the Conrad Black Trial (from a story in the Globe  as blogged here), and runs with it. It is a telling insider story, one that nicely clears up the difference between the notion of competitive markets and the real world of capitalism and [...]

The Wellesley Institute blog compares and contrasts a recent CCPA publication with the World Wealth Report: Two days, two reports, two very different worlds   The World Wealth Report 2007 released on Wednesday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini reports that the very rich (so-called high net worth individuals – HNWI) are getting even richer. And [...]

Writing an intervention in the NY Times, as NYC contemplates a congestion charge of its own, London Mayor Ken Livingstone makes the case based on London’s experience. A key success factor is the channeling of revenues from the tax into enhancing public transit, another example of offsetting regressive tax impacts on the spending side: … [...]

It’s great to have publications like The Western Standard keeping us on our toes. The following excerpt is from an article in today’s edition, “New Economy, Old Prejudices; Big Labour’s jobs campaign flies in the face of employment and wage growth,” that does not (yet) seem to be available online: The CLC contends that Canada’s [...]

A dispatch by email from McMaster’s (and PEF member) Roy Adams on last month’s ruling: In a dramatic and entirely unexpected decision, the Supreme Court of Canada on June 8th “constitutionalized” collective bargaining in Canada. From its inception, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has had a freedom of association clause but in a series [...]