The Progressive Economics Forum

George Monbiot summarizes the case for a world parliament, drawing on a new campaign being launched this week. I’ve always thought this to be a far-sighted and much-needed, if politically impossible, idea. Dare to dream, I suppose. Perhaps by the time I die the world will have something like a truly global parliament. (And if [...]

Everyone knows globalization is an irresistible worldwide process enveloping every economy, including Canada’s, in its market-driven tentacles.  Right? Wrong. In fact, since 2000, Canada’s economy has been curiously de-globalizing before our eyes.  The importance of global markets to our employment and production has been diminishing, not increasing – and at a remarkable pace.  Year-end GDP [...]

Canadian 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, [...]

Budget 2007 made interest on funds borrowed in Canada to finance foreign business operations nondeductible from Canadian corporate taxes. Finance Canada suggested that this arcane reform would raise relatively little revenue and, initially, business barely seemed to notice. More than a week after the budget, a Globe editorial and a Financial Post op-ed criticized the [...]

I’ve pasted below an excellent column from the Toronto Star by Carol Goar. The CLC’s analysis of the issue and policy prescriptions are avaialable from: http://www.canadianlabour.ca/index.php/Salimah_Valiani/1117 As I’ve noted earlier, its pretty hard to square the “shortage of Canadian workers” story from employers with the avaialable data on (flat) wage growth. There are clearly some [...]

Monday’s federal budget will certainly reaffirm the corporate-tax reductions already scheduled through 2011 and may announce further reductions. Between 2001 and 2004, the federal government reduced its corporate-income-tax rate from 28% to 21% and began phasing out its corporate-capital tax.  It has committed to eliminate the corporate surtax and reduce the corporate-income-tax rate to 18.5% between 2008 [...]

Yesterday, Finance Canada released “Tax Expenditures and Evaluations 2006.” The tax-expenditure figures confirm Andrew’s suggestion that the partial inclusion of capital gains now costs the federal government about $3 billion per year of forgone personal taxes: the 2006 projection is $3.1 billion. This partial inclusion cost an additional $3.4 billion of forgone corporate taxes that [...]

In case you missed it, last year UCLA’s Ed Leamer did an excellent critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. He plays cat and mouse with Friedman’s use of the term “flat”, offering up a review of economic theory and empirical evidence related to the theme, while making some pretty funny jokes at Friedman’s [...]