The Progressive Economics Forum

  1. He’s Number Two: Stephen Poloz was widely acknowledged in economic and political circles as the second-best choice for the top job at the Bank of Canada. So the surprise was not that he was chosen. The surprise was, Why Not Tiff Macklem? Will someone please find out and tell the rest of us? 2. [...]

An international poll commissioned by the International Trade Union Confederation found very strong support in many countries, including Canada, for the introduction of Financial Transactions Taxes (FTTs), such as the Robin Hood Tax.   Trade unions provided results of this poll in their meetings with world leaders at the G20 meetings in Los Cabos, Mexico. Despite initially [...]

The Harper government decided to attack Thomas Mulcair on the issue of Canadian support for additional IMF resources to deal with the euro area crisis, implying that Canadian taxpayers should not be asked to “bail out” a rich area of the world. As recounted in Macleans here, on June 8, “Before QP yesterday, the Conservatives [...]

Until quite recently, it seemed that the global economy was set for an extended period of stagnation, lacking an obvious engine of growth in the advanced economies as households deleveraged, as governments imposed harsh fiscal austerity programs, and as corporations failed to see any good reason to invest significantly in new capacity. Relative optimists could [...]

The revelations over how the federal Tories used a robo-calling firm (or firms) to contact voters in possibly 30 or more ridings during last year’s election – misleading them about where polling stations were located – is just another example of the Harper government’s undemocratic tactics. This is on top of their new on-line surveillance [...]

I was in Cannes last week with CLC President Ken Georgetti for the G20 Labour Summit.  (I know, tough job.) This event was arranged by the International Trade Union Confederation with the support of the French Presidency of the G20. Our group as a whole, consisting of labour leaders from the G20 countries and leaders [...]

Albeit in a highly nuanced way, the IMF has called on the G-20  to temper short-term fiscal austerity now that the global economy “has entered a dangerous phase.” In their submission to the October 14-15 meetings of G-20 finance ministers, the IMF call for medium-term fiscal consolidation plans to “create more policy space for near-term [...]

Prime Minister Harper’s op ed in the Globe today on his hopes for the Cannes summit is disappointing, even if the content comes as no surprise. His focus is on the danger of a relapse into a global recession precipitated by a worsening of the European financial crisis. This is indeed a hugely important issue which [...]

The advanced economies, including Canada, risk falling back into recession because of government spending cuts and a looming financial crisis. The Canadian Labour Congress has been calling for our federal government and the G20 governments to respond by putting jobs first. This paper summarizes the economic situation as of the end of September, 2011 and [...]

The meeting of G20 Labour Ministers in Paris on September 26-27, held in advance of the November G20 Summit in Cannes, reached some conclusions which go some (extremely modest) way toward living up to prior G20 commitments in London and Pittsburgh to promote quality jobs and a more progressive labour market model as part of [...]

I am attending the G20 labour ministers meeting next week, which is being held against the background of high unemployment in the advanced economies, and the prospect – highlighted by the IMF yesterday – for unemployment to increase even further in the months ahead. A key union demand – that the G20 establish an ongoing [...]

Here is the trade union statement to the World Economic Forum, which begins today: A New Reality for Workers? Statement of Labour Leaders to the World Economic Forum Davos, Switzerland, 26 – 30 January 2011

My thoughts on the Seoul G20 – from the Mark.

http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/01-tuacG8G20-Seoul_English.pdf Employment has fallen off the agenda with the turn to co-ordinated austerity in the struggling developed economies.  What remains to be seen is if they can engineer some kind of coherent program to stop everyone from counting on export led growth via devaluation.

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 [...]

I spoke yesterday at a well-attended pre G20 conference in Toronto  organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. My comments as part of a union researchers panel were based on a  short paper I wrote for the Foundation on the need for a new labour market model [...]

Further to my earlier post on the turn to fiscal austerity on the part of the IMF, OECD and G20, it increasingly strikes me that there is a fundamental contradiction between G20 goals going into the Toronto summit. At Pittsburgh, the G20 called for a “Framework for Strong, Sustainable, and Balanced Growth.” “We will need [...]

http://www.canadianlabour.ca/news-room/statements/global-unions-statement-g8g20-ontario-summit-take-action-jobs-sustain-recovery As G20 Leaders meet in Ontario, it is clear that the economic crisis that has wreaked havoc on the lives and livelihoods of working people is far from over. Not only is the ’global recovery’ fragile and uncertain, but in the Eurozone the financial crisis has evolved into a wave of speculation against major [...]

In line with a major shift in thinking at the OECD and the IMF on the most appropriate timing for “exit strategies” from fiscal stimulus, the G20 finance ministers dropped the usual call for continued stimulus through 2010 from their June 5 communique, and highlighted the need for more or less immediate fiscal consolidation. God [...]

G20 finance ministers released a communique last week, as did G20 labour and employment ministers.  These are straws in the wind which tell us what is likely to take place at the June Toronto G20 summit. Not to put too fine a point on it, panic about the prospects for global capitalism has been supplanted [...]

This morning Oxfam launched their “Robin Hood”  (financial transactions) tax campaign in Canada with a press conference in Ottawa and the launch of their website.   Together with Oxfam officials, I spoke in favour of the tax from an economics perspective and Dale Marshall from the David Suzuki Foundation talked about how revenue raised from it [...]

http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/inst/download/promoting.pdf This is quite an interesting and very timely paper  from the ILO International Institute for Labour Studies, squarely directed to next week’s meeting of G20 labour ministers.  As pressures to cut budget deficits intensify, it argues that job-centered spending measures can in fact reinforce fiscal sustainability while boosting employment.  Austerity measures which raise unemployment [...]

Belatedly, two days after the fact, the Globe picked up on Bank of Canada governor Carney’s discussion of the Bank’s model of the world economy (I blogged about that speech here) at a  speech to the Ottawa Economics Association (OEA) last Wednesday. The Globe spun the story in an unusual way by suggesting that the [...]

The media and pundits parsed Mark Carney’s speech today to the Ottawa Economics Association (OEA) every which way to Sunday today and concluded that Carney had effectively signaled the Bank’s intention to raise its target for the overnight interest rate sooner rather than later. But in all the hand wringing about the inevitability of rate [...]

I was surprised to see the IMF highlighting the potential virtues of a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) on the front page of its website.  The Bloomberg news service earlier had a good story about on the background of this idea, tracing it back to Keynes.   This is a proposal that progressive economists and unions have advocated for [...]

Last week the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) published an update for the G20 Summit on its call from earlier this year for a Global Green New Deal.  This update showed that Canada is close to the bottom in the stimulus funds it is committing to green economic areas. According to the UNEP, only 8% [...]

Summary The main result of the Pittsburgh summit was to institutionalize and modestly extend the global economic governance role of the G-20 which arose as a necessary response to the global economic crisis. There is talk of medium-term co-ordination of national macro-economic policies, and a “re-balancing” of the global economy. However, while this is welcome, [...]

Global Unions ‘Pittsburgh Declaration’ Global Unions’ Statement to the Pittsburgh G20 Summit (24-25 September 2009) I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1. The G20 leaders are meeting in Pittsburgh amidst reports that the global recession is bottoming out, with the massive decline in output in most major economies slowing, and that governments are preparing their strategies for exiting from [...]

The London G-20 summit last fall may go down history as the meeting that saved the world. That’s a huge exaggeration of course, but leaders did agree to a program of co-ordinated monetary and fiscal stimulus which may have arrested an economic free-fall, and they agreed to an agenda for financial re-regulation with a view [...]

I’m posting below an interesting missive from Peter Bakvis, the Washington representative of the International Trade Union Confederation, on an intersting shift of position on labour rights by the IFI.s “The World Bank has issued a memorandum to its country and sector directors instructing them to stop using the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) of its [...]