The Progressive Economics Forum

Toronto’s new mayor Rob Ford and his brother/advisor Doug just announced they are planning to contract-out garbage collection for half of the City of Toronto as soon as possible as the first step to outsourcing everything we can by next year. According to Doug Ford, this will save the city millions and millions of dollars [...]

It is, according to a major story by Barrie McKenna in today’s ROB. The story is full of telling anecdotes which ring more or less true. But I doubt that higher oil prices are, on net, a plus for the total Canadian economy in terms of either GDP or employment. True, high and rising oil [...]

Why yes of course we are, but perhaps not quite so urban as we think.  It is often asserted that most Canadians now live in big cities or their suburbs. But this is a bit misleading, leaving the impression that almost all of us live in Greater Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. Statscan has decided to [...]

The main objection to my argument about the treasury transfer effect is that American companies do not actually repatriate their Canadian profits and pay US corporate tax on them. As The Globe reported: Jack Mintz, director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, said the unique tax status of U.S. companies [...]

(Ben and Nick Rowe correctly pointed out that I goofed in the calculations in the earlier version of this post, which I have deleted and replaced.) How much money do I need for a secure retirement? That is the question many baby boomers are asking themselves. The short answer is, a lot, at least so [...]

Saskatchewan’s NDP opposition recently called for higher potash royalties, a position long advocated by this blog. Not surprisingly, the Saskatchewan Party government and the potash companies have objected. The argument from Premier Brad Wall and PotashCorp CEO Bill Doyle seems to be that mine expansions are occurring in Saskatchewan only because of royalty concessions granted [...]

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (WCI), Stephen Gordon reasonably argues that economic models can be useful for policy analysis even if they lack the predictive power needed for forecasting. He writes: A well-designed model will be able to reproduce the main features of interest of the real world. More importantly, it will also be able [...]

David Dodge is as close to an authoritative mainstream voice as we have on economic issues (not that that means he is always right, but he sure counts in the mainstream media.) Here is what David Dodge had to say on postponing corporate income tax cuts in a lecture at Queen’s a year ago. “In [...]