The Progressive Economics Forum

ILO Study on Impacts of Liberalization of Public Services

September 26, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

Winners or Losers? Liberalizing Public Services Edited by Ellen Rosskam International Labour Office, Geneva 2006 New state of the art review, available upon request by emailing your name/address to: secsoc@ilo.org. Approx. 400 pages. Free of Charge. Available from ILO Geneva Public services are being liberalized world wide, opened to foreign service providers, often turned into private services through privatization, commercialization, […]

Fiscal update and “fiscal imbalance”

September 26, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

Yesterday’s release of the Fiscal Reference Tables also provides data at the provincial level. I reckon that the latest federal surplus of $13.2 billion might start some new cries of “fiscal imbalance” among the provinces in the lead-up to some federal-provincial negotiations this Fall (apart from a wide-ranging discussion paper released at budget time, we still have no real idea […]

Income Inequality and Pensions

September 26, 2006 Andrew Jackson One comment

http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2006286.pdf This study, “Pension Coverage and Retirement Savings of Canadian Families, 1986 to 2003”, released by StatsCan today, highlights increased inequality of retirement savings at the family level. Unsurprisingly given increased inequality of both earnings and wealth, the top quintile of families are accumulating more retirement savings than was the case in the mid 1980s, while those at the bottom […]

We’re Number Sixteen!

September 26, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

For as long as I can remember, the Canadian government has been obsessed with “competitiveness.” It is part of the lexicon of government-speak, despite the fact that unlike productivity there is no established measure of “competitiveness”. So the term is more of a values statement than anything else. To address this shortcoming, the World Economic Forum created an index of […]

Cuts to Statistics Canada

September 26, 2006 Andrew Jackson One comment

Progressive economists should be disturbed about the cut to Statistics Canada’s Budget announced yesterday by Ministers Flaherty and Baird. The agency has to realize “operational efficiencies” amounting to $15 Million over two years – which may mean cancellation of one or two major surveys, or cuts to staff undertaking research and analysis. Despite the recent glitch in the CPI, StatsCan […]

OECD on Child Care and Early Learning

September 26, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

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 high quality childcare in […]

Surprise! Ottawa’s $13 billion surplus

September 25, 2006 Marc Lee One comment

The Annual Financial Report for the Government of Canada, fiscal year 2005/06, was released today, along with the updated Fiscal Reference Tables. Before getting to the numbers, let me rant for a moment on how astonishing it is to see the cover of the Annual Financial Report, freshly downloaded from the Department of Finance, sporting Tory blue, along with the […]

Pitfalls of private health insurance

September 22, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

It is fascinating to me that in the wake of the Chaoulli decision by the Supreme Court private options are becoming more commonplace in Canada, just as more and more sensible people in the US are calling for a Canadian-style universal public insurance model. Here’s Paul Krugman in the New York Times (as edited by Economist’s View) with a reminder […]

Health ministers on drugs

September 22, 2006 Marc Lee 2 comments

The Globe and Mail has coverage of a new report on the cost of a national pharmacare plan. I was not able to find a copy of the report cited on the National Pharmaceuticals Strategy website. Presumably it will be posted soon. I take issue with how this has been framed in the Globe. It is reported as something that […]

Behind Closed Doors:How Public Policy is Really Made

September 22, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

News of this recent corporate/ state/ military elite forum on deeper integration ofÂ North America is gradually trickling into the media, and being widely circulated on the internet. I donâ€™t usually tend to believe that our collective future is determined by secret corproate conspiracies, but the fact that this event was completely ignored by the mainstream media is as staggering […]

Who’s Productive, Anyway?

September 20, 2006 Jim Stanford One comment

I wrote a recent column for the Globe and Mail on the issue of working hours.Â It was a repsonse to a report from the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity that bemoaned that Ontarians worked significantly less hours than Americans (about 130 hours less per year, on average).Â In the Institute’s view, this makes Ontarians $3700 less “prosperous” per year […]

The Stench of Business

September 20, 2006 Jim Stanford Leave a comment

Here wasÂ an innocuous line from a recent Toronto Star story about the latter acts of the corporate soap opera that has been the battle for control of Inco and Falconbridge: “Inco must now pay Phelps a break fee of $125 million (U.S.), plus an extra $350 million if Inco â€œconsummatesâ€ another deal by Sept. 7.” These merger and takeover battles […]

Congestion pricing

September 20, 2006 Marc Lee 6 comments

Another aspect of the Swedish elections: voters in Stockhold back an already-introduced measure that changes a fee to motorists entering the city. Shades of London, where congestion pricing has been in effect for a few years now. In our traffic-clogged cities, it is an interesting question about if and how such congestion pricing might come into effect. The right has […]

Deregulation: not so smart

September 20, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

An oped by myself and Bruce Campbell appears in today’s Tyee, a great on-line paper with a BC focus. “Why ‘smart regulation’ isn’t” can be viewed here.

Ireland’s anti-poverty strategy

September 20, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

Remember a few years ago when Ireland was the talk of the chattering classes seeking to get big corporate tax cuts (they succeeded). Left unsaid at the time was that Ireland was the beneficiary of billions of euros in transfers in support of infrastructure, and that Ireland itself invested heavily in its education system (including free post-secondary education), and that […]

CD Howe Institute and Business Taxes

September 20, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

The Howe released today yet another study on marginal effective tax rates on business (METRs) by Jack Mintz today, this time calculating METRs for many countries. http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/ebrief_34.pdf The CD Howe’s METR findings and methodology seem to be taken at face-value almost universally these days eg cited by the Department of Finance and the latest OECD Economic Review of Canada. Yet […]

Economistsâ€™ Manifesto for Productivity

September 20, 2006 Andrew Jackson 3 comments

TD Economics has posted this manifesto, penned by Chief Economist Don Drummond, in the belief that it represents a broad consensus among economists on how to raise the rate of productivity growth in Canada. http://www.td.com/economics/special/dd0906_prod.pdf The manifesto – unsurprisingly – closely reflects the mainstream (Bay Street, Department of Finance, OECD) focus on “sound” macro policy, free trade, de-regulation and tax […]

Unspinning the Swedish elections

September 19, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

OK, so the glee of the right regarding the loss of the Socialists in the Swedish elections on Sunday was getting to me. Even though the new government, The Moderates, won by a squeaker, the end of the Swedish model has been triumphantly splashed across the world’s business pages. But as Peter Lindert has pointed out, the end of the […]

European employment rates

September 19, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

A short missive from Dean Baker: Old Europe Goes to Work Remember the days when the European welfare state led to economic stagnation and high unemployment? Well, like hula hoops and bobby socks, this story may be a relic of the past. The latest data from the OECD show that employment to population (EPOP) ratios for prime age workers (ages […]

It’s the crude, dude

September 19, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

Sorry Linda McQuaig, but that was the worst title ever for a book. Still, I could not resist using it, so what does that tell you? Last week, Statistics Canada released a short report, Boom Times: Canada’s crude petroleum industry (summary in the Daily here and full report here). Here is an interesting tidbit from the summary: In total, Canada […]

Who Benefits from Earned Income Tax Credits?

September 19, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

The last federal Liberal Budget promised to introduce a tax credit to supplement the incomes of the working poor, and this commitment was re-iterated in the first Conservative Budget. The recent Toronto-based task force on Modernizing Income Security for Working Age Adults advocated such a supplement, and this widely-publicized proposal has been taken up by several of the leading federal […]

The China (and India) Syndrome

September 19, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

Many progressive Canadian economists have noted recently that the share of GDP going to wages and salaries has dropped perilously low, as low as recorded statistics take us back in any event. This article from the Economist, via Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View, points out that this trend is not particular to Canada. They suggest that this is globalization at work, […]

HRSDC, Low Earnings and the Working Poor

September 18, 2006 Andrew Jackson 8 comments

An excellent article on issues facing the working poor in today’s Toronto Star cites a recent study by Human Resources and Social Development Canada in support of the employer counter-point that raising minimum wages would do little to help working poor families. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1158531020220 Indeed, precisely this point is made in an August, 2006 HRSDC Working Paper “When Working is not […]

Lies, damned lies and the Olympics

September 18, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

This CP article (published in the Globe and Mail) poo-poos the growing concern that Vancouver’s Olympic Games are coming in at great expense. Specifically, the article questions what projects should be included in the total price tag. The article should come with a warning, however: content written by the wife of former Finance Minister to the Campbell government back when […]

Olympic costs escalate

September 15, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

Back when Vancouver made its Olympic bid, the boosterism was phenomenal. The games were going to create 244,000 new jobs, $10.7 billion of economic activity, and so on. The BC government, who is on the hook for any cost over-runs, never did do a proper cost-benefit analysis of the games. In fact, they willfully confused costs and benefits by counting […]

Risk and deregulation

September 14, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

A new report by myself and Bruce Campbell for the CCPA was released today. It’s called Putting Canadians At Risk: How the federal government’s deregulation agenda threatens health and environmental standards. A lengthy title for a rather lengthy publication. In it we take issue with the government’s promotion of “smart regulation”, the current euphemism for deregulation (they discovered that deregulation […]

The OECD on Canadian Education Performance

September 13, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

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. However, the report notes stagnation in […]

Economic risk and the middle class

September 12, 2006 Marc Lee Leave a comment

An interesting discussion is happening over at The American Prospect. Called Debating the Middle it asks “Just how is the middle class faring in the modern American economy, and how should progressives tailor their message and program accordingly?” As in other posts on the US inequality debate, there are some insights and implications to be gleaned for Canada. And while […]

Sweden and the Future of Social Democracy

September 12, 2006 Andrew Jackson 3 comments

This week’s Economist magazine celebrates in advance the widely expected defeat of the Swedish social democrats in imminent national elections. Actually, a close reading of the data in the piece underlines the fact that Sweden’s economic performance has been well above average over the past decade, precisely the period in which one would have expected competitive downward pressures from the […]

What’s New on the “Fiscal Imbalance”?

September 12, 2006 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

The Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) organized a breakfast forum in Ottawa today (September 12), to launch a special issue of Policy Options on the so-called “fiscal imbalance” issue. A moderately decentralist (France St Hillaire) to distinctly pro province/ right of centre (Tom Courchene and Gilles Paquet) panel of economic experts lamented the collapse of provincial unity around […]

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