The Progressive Economics Forum

As BC and Ontario have now started paying the HST at the till, many people may be wondering when exactly can we expect to see those jobs postings opening up.
This is a good question. According to analysis commissioned by the BC government from economist Jack Mintz, titled British Columbia’s Harmonized Sales Tax: A Giant Leap [...]

That the HST will take a bite out of family budgets is clear to everyone. The main question right now is just how big of a bite.
Two studies released in BC earlier this week asked this exact question but came to very different conclusions.
On Monday, the Fraser Institute released a paper arguing that lower and [...]

Last Thursday’s Statistics Canada release of individual and household income data for 2008 marks a new era in the study of poverty in Canada.
Instead of reporting only on the Low Income Cut Offs (LICO), as they used to, Statistics Canada reported on three of the most common measures of low income in the same publication [...]

A recent article in The New York Times illustrates this point with the story of an unemployed administrative assistant in her 50s, who has not been able to find a job for over two years after being laid off. As the journalist explains, her difficulties are likely not the result of age discrimination, the weak [...]

As promised, here’s my fourth post inspired by the recent Fraser Institute report on taxes paid by Canadian families.
I can’t stand seeing people fall simple numbers tricks. And while I realize that I don’t have the time to argue with everyone who is wrong on the Internet, I try to make it a point to [...]

A recently released Fraser Institute report claims that the tax bill of the average Canadian family grew by a whopping 1,624% since 1961. This is an enormous number, designed to appeal to our sensationalism-hungry media, but it does not provide a meaningful comparison of today’s average tax bill and the tax bill our parents’ and [...]

The Fraser Institute and the CCPA do not typically see eye to eye, but they seem to agree that personal income taxes take up a relatively small fraction of the average tax bill — about 13 - 14%.
According to the Fraser Institute’s recent report on the average Canadian family’s tax bill, the average family earned [...]

It’s tax season and people are looking more closely at their incomes and the amount of taxes they pay.
The Fraser Institute released their annual Consumer Tax Index report yesterday, claiming that the total tax bill of the average Canadian family now takes up 41.7% of their income. This seems like a big number, which they [...]

When the global recession hit in late 2008, economic output and employment fell so steeply in such a short period of time that policy-makers were seriously concerned about the possibility of the downturn growing into a global depression. The sense of urgency led to unprecedented levels of multilateral economic coordination, with stimulus spending rolled out [...]

Yesterday, the Fraser Institute published a new report, which argues that the government stimulus did not drive Canadian economic growth in the last two quarters of 2009 and suggests that government spending on infrastructure was useless for the economy.
The report earned the scorn of Finance Minister Flaherty, who was quoted in the Vancouver Sun calling [...]

Last weekend, I spoke at a community event celebrating International Women’s Day in Vancouver. It got me thinking about the status of women in the Canadian economy, reflecting both on the successes over the last half century and on the areas where work is still needed to achieve gender equality.
As a young woman in Canada, [...]

A new study published today by the Frontier Institute for Public Policy finds that Vancouver has the most unaffordable urban housing market not just in Canada, but in all of Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: the [...]

The more I read about the Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, the more respect I have for him. He has proven to be an excellent choice for his position, much to the dismay of the Conservative government who created his job in the first place, back in the days when open government was on the [...]

It’s the leading article in the BC section of national newspapers today: BC’s Finance Minister has finally admitted that next year’s budget deficit would be much larger than the $495 million number than our Premier swore by during the recent election campaign. Private sector economists have been saying it for a while and it was [...]

The BC Public Accounts for 2008/09 fiscal year were released yesterday, showing that the province posted a surplus of $78 million or $28 million higher than projected in the 2008 Budget. Oh, phew, now we don’t have to worry about cabinet ministers facing the fines associated with a budget deficit under the Liberals’ balanced budget [...]

So says a new paper by UBC economist Phil Oreopoulos, Why Do Skilled Immigrants Struggle in the Labor Market? A Field Experiment with Six Thousand Resumes.
As a skilled immigrant with a non-Anglo sounding name I find this quite disturbing. As should native-born Canadians who like to think that their country is tolerant and welcoming to [...]

But you wouldn’t know it if you listened to the message that the BC Liberals have been sending in this provincial election campaign. Instead of discussing the merits of his party’s proposed economic recovery policy, the incumbent Premier prefers to tell British Columbians that responsible economic stewardship involves keeping the business sector happy and anything [...]

While BC has not formally abandoned the P3 model, there is a notable absence of new P3 announcements at a time when billions of dollars are being channeled to infrastructure spending. If P3s really provided value for money and brought the benefits of private sector efficiency and innovation to the delivery of public-sector infrastructure, then [...]

I came across an interesting piece in YES! Magazine about a city in Brazil that took an innovative approach to poverty reduction and practically ended hunger by adopting a food-as-a-right policy. Here is their story in a nutshell (although I recommend checking out the actual article).

Belo Horizonte is the fourth largest city in Brazil with [...]

Yesterday the CCPA released a new study on family income inequality in BC by yours truly, which reveals some disturbing statistics about family incomes over the past 30 years. The figure below summarizes our main findings.

Among our other key findings:

The gap between the wealthiest and the majority of BC families has grown dramatically over the [...]

Today’s Statistics Canada release of January employment numbers reveals staggering job losses:
Employment fell by 129,000 in January (-0.8%), almost all in full time, pushing the unemployment rate up 0.6 percentage points to 7.2%. This drop in employment exceeds any monthly decline during the previous economic downturns of the 1980s and 1990s.
More jobs were lost in [...]

Much has been written on this blog about immediate responses to the crisis. We have analyzed proposed measures in depth and advocated for bold novel solutions. But it seems to me that we haven’t spent much time looking forward a little past the here and now.
Last week, I was contacted by a Montreal-based journalist, Alex [...]

There’s a great article in today’s Vancouver Sun hammering on the fact that all major mainstream economists failed to anticipate the economic crisis. Provocatively titled Economics 101: Everything you know is wrong, the article quotes James Galbraith’s indictment on the mainstream of the profession that originally appeared in a New York Times Magazine article: [...]

Last Thursday the Vancouver Sun ran an opinion piece by yours truly entitled “BC’s minimum wage should not be a poverty wage.” I drew attention to the fact that between March 31 and May 1 this year, all other nine provinces increased their minimum wages and, as a result, BC now has one of the [...]

The Vancouver Sun ran an opinion piece by yours truly that revisits the recent Statistics Canada release of income and earnings numbers for 2006
…

Denying income inequality won’t make it go away

Iglika Ivanova, Special to the Sun
Published: Tuesday, June 24, 2008
The May release of the 2006 Census data on earnings and incomes sparked a heated debate about [...]

Jeffrey Simpson is right to lament that “there is no realistic, sensible debate” about health care in BC. Unfortunately, his May 13th Globe & Mail column “Even the redoubtable Premier Campbell struggles with health care” does not help. Simpson’s main point in the column is that health care spending in BC is rising out of [...]

“Post-secondary education plays an important role in ensuring there are highly trained people to fill the many positions that will be left vacant by the wave of retiring baby boomers,” says BC Minister of Advanced Education Murray Coell in a news release announcing the creation of a new doctoral degree program (in gerontology) at Simon [...]

Browsing through the letters to the editor in the two big Vancouver dailies this morning, I came across a letter from BC Premier Gordon Campbell responding to the recent Census findings of declining median incomes for workers in this province. The letter was published in both newspapers: a longer version under “Purchasing power and globalization” [...]

There is an interesting opinion piece in The Tyee this morning, aptly named Dying for the Rich, which points out the links between inequality and life expectancy. The article’s author, Crawford Kilian, should be praised for bringing up an angle that was virtually ignored by media commentators in their coverage of the recent [...]

Initiatives like the Public Library of Science have began to challenge the scientific publishers’ monopoly over the dissemination of research but now that high profile institutions like Harvard are coming on board with their own open access policies it really looks like the end of an era.
Earlier this year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences [...]