The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

The first chart in today’s Third Report on the Economic Action Plan (Chart 1.1, page 8 ) appears to show that Canada is tied with Japan for the largest stimulus package in the G-7. Exactly the same bar graph appeared in the Second Report back in June (Chart 1.2, page 12). While this seemingly impressive [...]

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, [...]

Keystone Liberals Yesterday, Andrew Coyne lambasted a Liberal Party “Reality Check” from Thursday that looks eerily similar to the table that I had posted on Monday. Like my table, the Liberals use the words “Growth”, “Decline”, and “Britain.” By contrast, the OECD’s tables use a negative sign (instead of words) to denote declines and refer [...]

Disappointingly, press coverage of Monday’s GDP numbers missed the fact that Canada had posted the worst second-quarter performance of any G-7 country.  To his credit, Julian Beltrame of Canadian Press picked it up on Tuesday. The media has redeemed itself by noting that today’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) projections suggest that Canada will [...]

This morning’s Gross Domestic Product figures put the lie to Prime Minister Harper’s claim that “we will come out of this faster than anyone.” While many other advanced economies grew or stabilized during the second quarter of 2009, the Canadian economy shrank by 0.9%. During this period, three G7 countries – Japan, Germany and France [...]

I happened to listen to the end of week media pundits on CBC Newsworld and CBC Radio late Friday afternoon. Most – especially Don Martin and Joan Bryden on Newsworld – seemed perplexed as to why former Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge might have chosen to be distinctly more gloomy abour our economic prospects [...]

The annual trade union statement to the G-8 was posted today at-    http://www.tuac.org/e-docs/00/00/02/3F/document_news.phtml I think its a pretty good analysis of the economic conjuncture, and the needed policy response. The Executive Summary is pasted below: 1. The crucial issues on the G8 Summit agenda — climate change, development and Africa — remain central for [...]