The Progressive Economics Forum

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 [...]

I had the opportunity to meet late last week with the OECD Policy Mission to Canada - the folks who write the country reviews. These meetings are usually interesting and useful, though I find the OECD Economics Department to be ultra neo liberal in their orientation.
Even so, I was a bit taken aback to read [...]

The big news for Canadians from the OECD’s Going for Growth 2010 report was that we should privatize Canada Post. An article in the current issue of Maclean’s (pages 26 and 27), which does not (yet) seem to be available online, sheds some interesting light on that recommendation:
[Yvan Guillemette was] working for the C. D. Howe [...]

The Canadian dollar is again becoming more overvalued. After dipping as low as 92 US cents at the end of October, it rocketed up to 96 US cents so far today.
Meanwhile, the OECD has released another month of purchasing-power data. Although the loonie’s average price on foreign-exchange markets edged up between August and September, its [...]

The OECD released an interesting short report today on how Canada compares to other countries in terms of the job impacts of the crisis.
http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/62/10/43707194.pdf
They project that our unemployment rate will increase by more than in any previous recession to about 10% in 2010 and will likely take a long time to fall.
They note a strong [...]

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 to the [...]

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 post [...]

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 was out of the country but have the impression that the extremely gloomy OECD forecast and critical recommendations for Canada released just before the G20 London summit were not given the attention they deserved.
http://www.oecd.org/document/59/0,3343,en_2649_33733_42234619_1_1_1_1,00.html

The OECD released its intermim outlook largely to push the case for more stimulus by G20 countries, particularly [...]

The 2008 OECD Survey of Canada incorporates a long and surprisingly critical overview of developments in the energy sector, with a major focus on the tar sands. (Chapter 4). It is, in many respects, far closer to the views of the Pembina Institute and the Parkland Institute in Alberta than to those of the Alberta [...]

The 2008 OECD Economic Review of Canada
http://www.oecd.org/document/3/0,3343,fr_2649_201185_40732867_1_1_1_1,00.html
contains most of the standard neo liberal policy prescriptions we have come to expect - including a proposed shift to a consumption based tax system. However, they do have the good grace to devote two pages (84-85) to “equity considerations” and even concede that [...]

Just in from Paris, some fascinating quotables from the OECD:
Governments must do more to help workers adapt to new global economy, says OECD
Rather than seeing globalisation as a threat, OECD governments should focus on improving labour regulations and social protection systems to help people adapt to changing job markets.
That is the message from the 2007 [...]

Two Canadian macro articles diverted me from my best laid plans today. Side by side, the two make for some interesting observations on the state of the Canadian economy, as well as some fodder for thinking about what drives investment. The first, a Statscan piece by Phillip Cross, is a demand-led investment story, with most [...]

Recently in Paris for meetings between the OECD Economic Department and TUAC (the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD), I found my trade union colleagues concerned about the “downside” risks of an increasingly gloomy economic outlook.
The OECD Economics Department believes that there will be a pronounced slowdown in the US - driven by the [...]

The following is from Roland Schneider of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. We live in curious times when the impeccably neo liberal OECD is positioned well to the left of the federal government on this issue.
It goes without saying that trade unions across the OECD have been campaigning for accessible, affordable and [...]

An OECD Briefing Note on Canada released with the 2006 “Education at a Glance” Indicators http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/52/1/37392733.pdf shows that we are generally doing very well in a comparative context - high rates of post secondary education completion; good scores on international attainment tests; and relatively equal educational outcomes by social class compared to other countries. [...]

Neoclassical economics, when looking at the labour market, plots its supply and demand curves, with all of their loaded and unrealistic assumptions, and finds an equilibrium wage and employment. Then it finds that anything added on to this simplistic and flawed model – taxation, unions, minimum wages – perturbs that equilibrium. Therefore those things must [...]

Jim Stanford looks at the OECD’s press for labour market “flexibility” in his Globe column:
Traditional economics holds that a less regulated, more “flexible” labour market — freed from well-meaning but counterproductive government interference — will automatically find a better match between supply and demand, and hence reduce unemployment.
This general view was roundly endorsed by the [...]