The Progressive Economics Forum

The Budget contains no big surprises but is still a big disappointment. Despite the fact that unemployment is and will remain very high, economic stimulus measures effectively end after this year. A few very small new investments in jobs and skills will be made, but they do not amount to even the beginnings of a [...]

(I wrote the following to circulate to some European colleagues.)
Apparently former Canadian Finance Minister and Prime Minister Paul Martin is being tapped by the Europeans for advice on fiscal matters. “Former prime minister Paul Martin, finance minister in the 1990s when Canada’s dangerously high federal deficit was tackled and then eliminated, said Thursday he’s been [...]

In an important series of columns in the Financial Times, economics editor Martin Wolf has been making the argument that - to avoid a relapse into recession - governments must run deficits so long as the private sector is running large surpluses of savings over spending.
“Jumps in fiscal deficits are the mirror image of retrenchment [...]

Greece is being played in the media as a morality play in which a profligate government is brought to account by the  bond market and forced to submit to stern - but justified - austerity measures.  While Greek economic governance before the socialists recently returned to power was not without huge flaws, this account misses [...]

Following are my speaking notes for a presentation I was asked to make to labour ministers last week. I found myself much much more gloomy than my fellow panelists who think that we shall soon be experiencing labour and skills shortages. I hope they are right - but fear that this theme is being developed [...]

Here is the link to a very good paper by Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD.
http://www.tuac.org/en/public/e-docs/00/00/06/7C/document_doc.phtml
The IMF appears to be consulting quite widely and with some sympathy to proponents of an FTT , so we may yet get a positive report to the G20, opening up a realistic possibility of [...]

Some puzzling comments in today’s Globe story casting cold water on the notion that there is a housing bubble.  The story makes the classic anti bubble argument that national averages conceal a lot of local variation, reflecting local conditions.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/the-home-price-puzzle/article1475073/
“Toronto-Dominion Bank economist Pascal Gauthier says the diverse nature of Canada’s real estate market means a U.S.-style [...]

It is striking that, even while moved to concern and some action, the Bank of Canada and the Minister of Finance are still desperately afraid to admit that Canada is experiencing a housing bubble.
One can go on and on about how difficult it is to spot a bubble. But, as Dean Baker has often argued [...]

I contribute occasionally to a web based publication, The Mark.  Today they are running my piece on the continuing crisis in the job market, and the need for governments to respond.
http://themarknews.com/articles/948-still-in-recession
The first few paras follow:
“While the situation is not quite as daunting as in the U.S., Canada’s job market is still mired in [...]

Who would have thunk it. Seems like there is a pretty radical rethink of monetary policy verities going on at the IMF of all places. The exchange rate rethink seems especially relevant to Canadian monetary policy and they will be aghast at the Bank of Canada on the case for higher inflation targets.
From today’s FT
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9f4067e-1758-11df-87f6-00144feab49a.html
IMF [...]

An interesting column, arguing that the very limited rise in unemployment in the Great Recession in Australia owes a lot to a well-constructed stimulus program of the Labour government, based on higher transfers to lower income households plus short and medium term infrastructure investment.
http://column.global-labour-university.org/2009/11/riding-your-luck-and-adopting-right.html

I highly recommend a very convincing argument for the FTT by Stephan Schulmeister of  the Austrian Institute for Economic Research. His paper   effectively counters the “rational markets” view that high volumes of speculative trading move stock, currency and commodity prices towards equilibrium values based on fundamentals. Instead, such trading moves prices away from fundamentals for [...]

The survey of private sector economists released by the Department of Finance today offers up a pretty bleak forecast that the national unemployment rate will average 8.5% in 2010, up a bit from the 8.3%  average in 2009 and up a bit from 8.4%  last month (December, 2009) .  http://www.fin.gc.ca/n10/data/2010-08_1e.pdf
That forecast strikes me as pretty [...]

Oxfam are seeking endorsements of this letter by professional economists. If you want to sign on, please notify
Sophie Freeman: SFreeman@Oxfam.org.uk
Dear G20
As economists from across the world, we call on you to implement a financial transaction tax (FTT).
This tax is an idea that has come of age. The financial crisis has shown us the dangers of [...]

The Global Labour University are publishing Global Labour Columns on the general theme of how labour should be responding to the crisis.  The most recent is by yours truly,  re working some pieces previously posted to this blog.
The other columns posted are well worth a look.
http://column.global-labour-university.org/

The content in the EI report by myself and Sylvain Schetagne which was released by the CCPA yesterday won’t be new to readers of this blog - an updating of trends in unemployment and EI use to show that tens of thousands of workers who lost their jobs early in the Great Recession are and [...]

STEERING COMMITTEE OF PROVINCIAL/TERRITORIAL MINISTERS
ON PENSION COVERAGE AND RETIREMENT INCOME ADEQUACY
OPTIONS FOR INCREASING PENSION COVERAGE AMONG
PRIVATE SECTOR WORKERS IN CANADA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper released by BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen for the provincial/territorial ministers indicates much more fundamental problems with our pension system than those identified in the Mintz Report and gives serious consideration to the [...]

On the eve of the Whitehorse meeting of Finance Ministers in December, the Howe released a report co-authored by Bill Robson which charged that the federal government’s pension plan liabilities on behalf of its own employees are greatly under-stated - to the tune of $58 billion. This sum  should, he argued, be added to the [...]

The case for a Financial Transactions Tax or FTT has crept in from the margins remarkably quickly. One year ago, the proposal for an internationally co-ordinated “Tobin Tax” on foreign exchange transactions was a dim memory from the early part of the decade. Today, the idea of broadening such a tax to include a far [...]

The Global Labour University are publishing an interesting series of Global Labour Columns. The most recent by Patrick Belser - author of the ILO Global Wage Report - looks at the impact of the Great Recession on wages.
http://column.global-labour-university.org/2010/01/why-we-should-care-about-wages.html
“Focusing on unemployment rates alone understates the true extent of the deterioration of employment and conditions of work [...]

There is an interesting piece on productivity in today’s Daily looking at the changing relationship between output change and employment change in recessions, over time and as between Canada and the US. One part of the story is that employers used to hoard labour during recessions, but are now inclined to cut jobs and hours [...]

CSPI have just published the second edition of my book, Work and Labour in Canada: Critical Issues.
While this is written mainly as a text for university level courses, others may find it useful as a resource on a wide range of labour market issues and trends, including the role of unions.
The book can [...]

This IMF staff paper - the lead author is the chief economist, Olivier Blanchard -is well worth reading.  Makes a rather urgent call for expansion of internal consumption demand in China and currency realignments if  we are to work our way out of the crisis.
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/spn/2009/spn0929.pdf

Further to my earlier post on the Mintz report on pensions http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/12/20/the-mintz-report-and-the-pensions-debate/ Statistics Canada have released the major study on income replacement rates in retirement by Yuri Ostrovsky and Grant Schellenberg which was cited at some length by Mintz.
http://cansim2.statcan.gc.ca/cgi-win/cnsmcgi.pgm?Lang=E&AS_Abst=11F0019M2009321&ResultTemplate=/Stu-Etu/Anal_RchAbst

The study looks at the incomes of retirees in their early 70s in 2006 in relation to [...]

There is more evidence in today’s release of EI data that the decline in the number of EI beneficiaries is being driven by exhaustion of benefits rather than by a fall in unemployment.
Between September and October, the number of unemployed (seasonally adjusted) rose by 37,700 but the number of regular EI beneficaries (also seasonally adjusted) [...]

I blogged back in August to express some concern about the implications of Jack Mintz’s appointment as research director for the federal and provincial finance minister’s review of the Canadian pension system. http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/08/06/jack-mintz-research-and-pensions/#comment-20646 .   Suffice to say now that the general thrust of  his report, tabled this week,  http://www.fin.gc.ca/activty/pubs/pension/riar-narr-eng.asp , did not come as a [...]

As the communique from the Pittsburgh G20 put it,  “it worked.”  Unprecedented macro-economic stimulus in the form of ultra low interest rates and large government deficits pulled the global economy back from the abyss.  Canada has now joined most countries in exiting the recession, at least very tentatively. But what is next?
The official line from [...]

The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009 by British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy (Published in Radio Times)
http://www.radiotimes.com/content/features/carol-ann-duffy-the-twelve-days-of-christmas/
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS,
a buzzard on a branch.
In Afghanistan,
no partridge, pear tree;
but my true love sent to me
a card from home.
I sat alone,
crouched in yellow dust,
and traced the grins of my kids
with my thumb.
Somewhere down the line,
for [...]

The following is an extract from the CLC publication “Recession Watch” available at
http://www.canadianlabour.ca/sites/default/files/Recession-Watch-03-Fall-2009-EN.html
Before the recession, more than one in four (27.9%) of claimants exhausted their benefits (29.9% of women and 26.5% of men) and more than one in three (34.3%) older workers exhausted their benefits. Currently, claimants are eligible for between 19 weeks and 50 [...]

The Globe seems rather agitated about the plight of  male university students . On top of a front page story by Elizabeth Church yesterday pointing out the now rather well known fact that female undergraduate enrollment now outstrips male enrollment by a margin of 58% to 42%, they editorialize today as follows:
“Indira Samarasekera, the president [...]