The Progressive Economics Forum

It has been a while but this week climate change is back in the news cycle. The front page of today’s Globe reports on the latest climate impacts tally:
The report …  concluded 2000 to 2009 was the warmest decade ever, and the Earth has been growing warmer for 50 years. Each of the past three [...]

The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, is an important book. It is not a huge tome, as one might expect from such a broad topic, weighing in at just 265 pages of text (including lots of figures mapping inequality against some health and social [...]

With summer comes a lightening of my work load, so I’ve finally found some time to dive into a few interesting books. These are all related to my ongoing research interests (I do have some fiction sitting around waiting for a real holiday, with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna at the top of the pile):
The Story [...]

A few years ago an important study, by Marc Frenette, David Green and Kevin Milligan, Revisiting Recent Trends in Canadian After-Tax Income Inequality Using Census Data, was published by Statscan. It did not get much profile but its implications for the current census debacle are startling. The authors summarize:
… [E]xisting data sources may miss changes [...]

The BC government has released its final estimates of the cost of staging the 2010 Winter Games, highlighting the problems this government has with telling the truth (other examples include the 2009 pre-election fudge-it budget, and the HST). The Tyee reports:
British Columbia’s government spent $325 million more on the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics than [...]

Under the “we told you so” category, I am filing the BC public accounts for 2009/10. The province closed the year with a deficit of $1.8 billion. As Will McMartin comments in The Tyee:
… B.C.’s public accounts for the fiscal year 2009/2010 conclusively prove that the pre-election fiscal plan foisted on British Columbians by Premier [...]

On a weekend getaway to Washington state, I was alarmed at how much cheaper gas prices are south of the border. Typically, we paid $3 per gallon, whereas the price in Vancouver upon our return was $1.16 per litre, which is $4.39 per gallon (with the exchange rate roughly parity over the weekend).
This is an [...]

With all of the attention focused on the HST implementation on July 1, most people seemed to miss the next increment of that other much-hated tax, BC’s carbon tax. As of July 1, the carbon tax is now $20 per tonne of CO2, or about 4.6 cents on a litre of gasoline. And like any [...]

At the end of May in Quebec City at the annual Canadian Economics Association conference, the PEF awarded the second John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics to John Loxley. Below is the full text of John’s Galbraith Lecture (pdf version with proper footnotes and formatting here). Congrats again to John for a lifetime of amazing [...]

I’m happy to be in Vancouver not my home town of Toronto right now. Turning Toronto into a police state for a few days at the cost of $1 billion hardly seems like a good use of public funds, especially when we know the final communique will preach fiscal belt tightening.
But what does $1 billion [...]

After watching yet another 0-0 draw, my excitement for the World Cup is more muted than when things kicked off a week ago. In part, it was dismal play by my home squad, England, but it’s deeper than that. Coming right off the Stanley Cup playoffs, even the drama of international competition can only somewhat [...]

Thanks to Marc Lavoie and Mario Seccareccia, from the University of Ottawa, who oversaw and judged our essay contest for 2010. And also thanks to the entrants to this year’s competition, as Marc and Mario reported a record number of entries and a very high quality of writing. Here are the winners:
Undergraduate Winner ($500 Prize):
Rob [...]

A guest post from PEF Steering Committee Marc Lavoie of the University of Ottawa:
Tax the very rich and solve the PBO problem
Among the dozen or so sessions I attended at the meeting of the Canadian Economics Association last week-end in Quebec City, one was devoted to the forthcoming fiscal crisis and another [...]

For years we have been asking Stephen Gordon to provide the evidence for lower corporate taxes. Like Stephen I like the Nordic model and take away from it that tax mix matters, so funding a large public sector may require more than taxes on “people we do not know” (ie corporations and the rich), so [...]

Hi all,
Last time I was in Quebec City, I got tear gassed by my government during the 2001 Summit of the Americas. I’m sure next week’s trip for the CEA conference will be much better than that. In fact, we have an amazing line up of panels, including a new Galbraith lecture from this year’s [...]

The CCPA released a report of mine, critiquing federal regulatory policy. Called Canada’s Regulatory Obstacle Course, the brief looks at the latest development in federal deregulation, the Cabinet Directive on Streamlining Regulation (CDSR, announced in the 2007 budget), but situates it in the context of ongoing deregulation that has been underway since the 1980s. The [...]

I have a short Climate Justice publication out for Earth Day today, looking at the breakdown of greenhouse gas emissions by income quintile in BC, then asking what is fair when it comes to mitigation policies. I draw on some fairness criteria from the international literature on fair emission reductions, and test out two stylized [...]

The Guardian has done a great service by developing and putting on-line this cool carbon calculator. It is a visualization tool that lets ordinary folks, and politicians (as there is an election campaign on right now), plug in their choices about how to meet GHG emission targets. They even share the back end spreadsheet, so [...]

I was intrigued by a quote in a recent Globe Foundation report on BC’s green economy that BC has 1000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, a “low carbon resource opportunity for both transportation and for export to other economies around the world.” Converting to metric, and using BC government emission factors for combusting [...]

My colleague Bill Rees likes to say that fossil fuels are a powerful hallucinogenic drug. We are all addicted to cheap and abundant fossil fuels, and so have reshaped our economy and society in fundamentally unsustainable ways.
In a recent post, I highlighted some research that breaks out of the box of counting emissions only where [...]

Please join us in Quebec City this May 28-30 for another round of PEF sessions at the Canadian Economics Association meetings. Here is the tentative PEF line-up for the meetings.
Friday, 09:00 - 10:30
PEF I: Was Financialization Rational for Capital?
Organizer: Robert Chernomas (U. of Manitoba)
-Fletcher Baragar, “Why Financialization, Why Now?”
-Robert Chernomas, “From Growth Stagnation to [...]

When emissions are reported for the US or Canada, there is an accounting convention that restricts the total to emissions released within the borders of that jurisdiction. This means that Canada’s exports of tar sands oil are counted only to the extent that fossil fuels are used in the extraction and processing, not the combustion [...]

Like most economists, I’m big on efficiency. Even in my personal life I tend to group tasks together so that I save time, and I always feel a bit guilty if I retroactively realize I somehow failed to optimize my behaviour.
In my recent work on climate change, efficiency comes up in the context of GHG [...]

I did not make it to the federal budget lock-up, and having pored over the document I am pleased to say I missed it. There is very little in this budget that one would expect of a budget in the midst of a recession (the GDP numbers have turned up, I know, but unemployment is [...]

I am pleased to announce John Loxley as the winner of the 2010 John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics. John will be joining us in Quebec City during the Canadian Economics Association meetings at the end of May to give the Second Galbraith Prize lecture. Please join us if you can make it!
Below is an [...]

The 2010 BC Budget was a disappointment on the climate action front. Even as Premier Campbell waxed in the Globe about the impact of climate change on the 2010 Spring Games – with its sunny days, crocuses, daffodils and by the end, cherry blossoms making it fun for people on the street but a big [...]

[Notes from Marc and Iglika]

For a document titled Building a Prosperous British Columbia, the 2010 BC Budget is underwhelming in its ambition. Budget 2010 shows a government talking a lot about the legacy of the Olympics but lacking any coherent vision of how translate upbeat sentiments into real improvements in British Columbians’ standard of living.

This [...]

Thanks to Stephen Gordon, who made a link to a new unpublished study (fourth draft, 2009), The effect of corporate taxes on investment and entrepreneurship, by Djankov, Ganser, McLiesh, Ramalho and Shleifer. Stephen claims this study settles the matter that Canada should not reverse corporate tax cuts made in recent years. That discussion was happening [...]

Perhaps by now you have seen the TV commercials for Bell touting its much faster 3G network for web phones. Rogers is suing on the basis that Bell is basically making this up. What’s interesting about it, though, is that Bell, Telus and others entering the web phone (or should we just say iPhone) business [...]

Back in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there [...]