More than one million people marched in Santiago on October 26 to protest the Government’s security response to Chile’s current political crisis and to demand structural economic reforms to reduce inequality and increase social services. In this post I analyze these grievances from a quantitative perspective and explore what it would take to translate them into policy. This is my […]
Read moreI had been waiting for last month’s publication of the book “Confronting Inequality” before preparing my annual update on income inequality and redistribution in Canada. I am glad I did because the book presents new and exciting empirical findings that shed light on the age-old equity/growth debate (more on that below), but also introduced me to the Standardized World Income […]
Read moreSoon after the 2015 federal election, Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau affirmed that Canada was back as a “compassionate and constructive voice in the world” after a decade of Conservative governments. One of the most important means by which any industrialized country interacts with the developing world is via the amount, composition and effectiveness of its foreign aid, which can help […]
Read moreIn this guest post Tom Webb gives a summary of the pitch in his new book, that co-operatives are the answer to the problems of the global capitalist agenda. At the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary’s University, at the beginning of the new millennium, I was part of a team creating a masters level program for managers of […]
Read moreThere is some discussion in Nova Scotia about the possibility of the government introducing a carbon tax in the next budget. In this blog post I will introduce the context within which these discussions are taking place, and make reference to other blog posts in this forum that provide insights into how the province might best approach a carbon tax […]
Read moreOne remarkable and gratifying aspect of our special series of commentaries marking the 50th Anniversary of Mel Watkins’ classic 1963 article on staple theory, is the interest and input it has generated from researchers and scholars who have applied Mel’s work in various capacities, in Canada and internationally. One such contributor is Gerry Helleiner, a globally-recognized development economist and professor […]
Read moreAnother year, another dead Canadian tech giant. Blackberry was sold yesterday for scrap to the Toronto private equity firm Fairfax. The purchase price of $4.7 billion is essentially valued at its cash of $2.6 billion and the value of its patents. Blackberry’s active businesses are being valued at essentially nothing. If Fairfax can stop the incredible burn rate of $1 […]
Read moreToday’s CBC Edition Business Panel focused on the proposal by Fraser Surrey Docks to build a new coal terminal on the Fraser river to export US thermal coal (if you missed it, here’s the recording starting at 1:50). This may seem like a local issue for the West Coast, but the arguments stand for most of the debates on new […]
Read moreFour years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, it’s time to take stock of things by asking a stock political question: Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Where you stand on the answer depends on where you sit. Many people, businesses and communities are still struggling to regain the ground they lost after September 15, 2008, the […]
Read moreThe following is another excerpt from Dr. Ryan Meili’s new book, A Healthy Society: How a Focus on Health Can Revive Canadian Democracy, which fellow blogger Greg Fingas has been discussing. The road to Tevele is red sand and sloppy in the rainy season. The pick- up truck bounces in and out of ruts as we head thirty-some kilometres from […]
Read moreA shorter version of this analysis appears at the Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab. See article and comments here. Last fall Premier Danny Williams wondered what could drive anyone to let hundreds of millions of dollars slip through their fingers. Last week he got his answer. The Roil report on the 18-month strike at Voisey’s Bay nickel mine in northern […]
Read moreThis article was first published at the Globe and Mail’s Economy Lab. As Parliament resumes after Canada’s historic 41st election, all eyes are on Prime Minister Stephen Harper and how he delivers on his campaign promises of growth and stability. With no encumbrances to its decision-making powers, the Harper majority government will be responsible — and will be seen as […]
Read moreIt took me a long time to write my first blog. It was here, and it was in response to the global economic collapse as it was occurring in real time, in late September 2008. For economists, the blogosphere is a rapid response world, and speed can kill. I worried about getting caught undone in public – either missing something […]
Read moreEvery party is courting the women’s vote. They are The Undecided – more women than men are still parking their vote. That’s typical of most elections. Women listen for longer, decide later in an election campaign. When the time comes, they will be the kingmakers, if you’ll pardon the term. It leaps to mind because Stephen Harper just said, in […]
Read moreMartin Khor, of the South Centre, has done an interesting analysis for the (doomed) Cancun negotiations on climate change. The talks have broken down on north-south lines, with southern countries wanting to keep the Kyoto framework that puts the onus on northern (advanced, industrialized) countries to reduce emissions and give carbon space to southern countries carbon to develop their economies. […]
Read moreAt 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 work! Also, thanks to one […]
Read moreI recently had the joy of spending a couple of weeks in Kerala, the little socialist state at the bottom tip of India. Apart from exquisite food, friendly people, beautiful jungles, and welcoming climate, Kerala’s greatest asset of course is its astonishing record in producing a literate, healthy, politically engaged society — all on the strength of a very modest […]
Read moreAs Copenhagen heads into week two, most of the talk has shifted to targets and timelines, typically something like X% of emissions by 2020 or 2050, relative to 1990 levels. This dating is a legacy of the German delegation in the lead-up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, who wanted a base year of 1990 because their Eastern halves had […]
Read moreFurther to today’s release on ecological footprint by income decile for Canada, Stephen Pacala of Princeton has done some calculations on who is most to blame internationally for CO2 emissions (conference speech and presentation available here). An excerpt: All 3 billion of the lowest emitting people emit a total, all together, of a half a billion metric tons of CO2. […]
Read moreFrom the Latin Americanist: Bank of the South launched Representatives of seven South American countries met on Sunday to formally launch the Bank of the South– a new regional development bank. In a ceremony in Buenos Aires, the bank was established with an initial capital of $7 billion and with the goal of acting as a viable alternative to other […]
Read moreThe WTO talks have collapsed. Wait, did I not report that last year? Alas, talks are never really over, the Doha Round never really “dead” as reported in the papers. Just stalled. But as Cameron points out in his rabble.ca column (thanks to Duncan and rabble for sharing columns with RPE), this recent impasse has a lot to do with […]
Read moreSachs’ article below suggests that China’s growing influence on the world stage may well signal the end of neoliberalism. That ideological framework of monetarism, liberalization, deregulation and privatization was imposed through structural adjustment programs, mostly in Latin America and Africa, with terrible results. Meanwhile, most Asian countries flouted those policy prescriptions en route to steller economic gains (the 1997-98 Asian […]
Read moreA dispatch from Ellen Gould that is a bit nebulous on the surface: Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua are withdrawing from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Ellen explains: It’s a little bit complicated to understand why this is such fantastically positive news, but this development basically means Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are making it far more difficult […]
Read moreThe annual G8 meetings often result in a group hug (aka the “summit declaration). Much of the time, when the goals are laudable, they fail to achieve the desired result, as Sachs comments below on the MDGs, or they misrepresent what they are doing in the first place (remember the 2000 release that “ended” third world debt?). The Millennium Development […]
Read moreCanadian Aid Performance Declines in 2006: The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) released preliminary statistics for ODA for 2006 and Canada is near the bottom, tied with Australia for 15th position among 22 donors.  At 0.30% of our Gross National Income (GNI) in 2006,  Canada is down from 0.34% in 2005. In both years, Canadian aid, along with other […]
Read moreWe have been picking on copyright a lot recently, but we should not neglect patents, that other arm of “intellectual property”. Like copyright, patents confer monopoly power. They have little to do with a “free market” but everything to do with real-world capitalism. In his monthly column, Joseph Stiglitz makes the case against patents with a focus on pharmaceutical drugs. […]
Read moreI was at the very first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, back in 2001. My wife and I were travelling in Brazil and Argentina, fuelled by cheap passes from a relative at Air Canada, so we had to make a stop to check out the WSF. It was amazingly new and sexy (perhaps that was just the Brazilian […]
Read moreI recently read somewhere a commentary that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was not really that radical, that his populist rhetoric was largely limited to expanding social programs for the poor, and that behind the scenes he was still playing nice with US businesses. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost the link to that article. Perhaps Chavez’s latest announcement will alter that […]
Read moreThe Dominion Institute has recruited twenty great Canadian thinkers to write about what the country might look like in 2020. The fourteen essays currently posted include Don Drummond’s neo-classical analysis of manufacturing and productivity and Jim Stanford’s excellent analysis of Canada’s reliance on natural resources. Jim’s main argument, that Canada’s unmanaged resource boom is damaging other industries and our natural environment, […]
Read moreThe World Distribution of Household Wealth, by James B. Davies, Susanna Sandstrom, Anthony Shorrocks, and Edward N. Wolff, was released by the World Institute for Development Economics Research. A Canadian (and a former prof of mine at Western – Go Mustangs!) is the lead author. The full paper is available here. The extended press release doubles as the report’s summary: […]
Read more