World Bank Joint Ventures With JP Morgan

(The following was sent by ITUC Washington representative Peter Bakvis and deserves wider distribution. While this action by the World Bank might reduce food prices at the margin, it would be far preferable for them to push for regulation of speculation in food instead of joining in a destructive game.)   In partnership with Wall Street investment bank JP Morgan, […]

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Incomes and the Recession

Today’s Statscan release “Incomes of Canadians” provides data for 2009 and a partial reading on the impacts of the recession. (I say partial because the 2008 annual average data were impacted by the onset of the recession in the last quarter of the year, and since these impacts continued well into 2010.) The data give some sense of the devastating […]

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The Case Against Wage Insurance

 At the CEA meetings I participated on a panel organized by IRPP to discuss a recent paper  – by Finnie and Gray – on older laid-off workers and the policy option of “wage insurance.”  The paper shows that older laid off workers leaving stable jobs and finding new employment typically experience significant declines in earnings – in the range of […]

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Canada Doesn’t Deserve the Silver

It has been widely reported in the Globe and elsewhere that Canada ranks #2 in the just-released OECD Better Life Index, outstripped only by Australia. I am all for measures of objective and subjective social well-being that go beyond GDP as a measure of progress, and this OECD report offers up some useful information. But providing grounds for national chest […]

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Exiting from the Crisis

“Exiting from the Crisis: Towards a Model of More Equitable and Sustainable Growth” is a new book (over 270 pages) now available on line. This volume of essays from global trade union leaders and economists is the product of the Global Unions Taskforce on a New Growth Model, a joint project of the Trade Union Advisory Committee (TUAC) to the […]

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Reflection on the Election

Poring over the entrails leads me to a couple of observations. First, as is usually the case, the change in the distribution of seats which commands headlines is an imperfect reflection of the change in the distribution of votes. The NDP breakthrough in Quebec was remarkable and historically important and unprecedented, but so was the NDP surge in English Canada.  […]

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How to Help the Long Term Unemployed

 The OECD have weighed in on what policy measures are needed to limit the damage of long term unemployment in the aftermath of the Great Recession. I would judge the NDP platform – which includes a significant job creation tax credit and increased EI benefits – to be closest to the OECD prescription. The OECD note in a pre release […]

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Retail Prices: The US vs Canada

I saw quite a lot of media coverage of  a BMO report that Canadian retail prices are 20% higher than in the US despite exchange rate parity. There were allegations of price  gouging and references to the allegedly much more intensely competitive US retail environment. I hesitate somewhat to say so in case the argument is misused, but there are […]

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Recession Watch

Today, by way of background to tomorrow’s labour force release, , the Canadian Labour Congress released the fifth issue of our Recession Watch bulletin (prepared by my colleague Sylvain Schetagne.) It highlights just how much slack there still was in the job market in February, 2010 compared to before the recession. Despite the rise in jobs since the bottom was […]

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Raising the Minimum Wage

Ken Battle of the Caledon Institute has written a very useful report, “Restoring Minimum Wages in Canada.” It contains a wealth of data on minimum wage trends by province since 1965  and their changing relationship to average wages and to the low income line. Battle shows that, in almost all provinces and territories,  with the notable exception of BC, minimum […]

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Corporate Tax Cuts and Investment

It is notable that the Globe has run a major story today – on p.1, above the fold in the print edition – drawing attention to the fact that recent  corporate tax rate cuts have not produced an increase in real business investment. Reference is made to the views of labour economists. The Globe story will not be “news” to […]

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Dismal Income Prospects For Gen X Retirees

There is an interesting new piece on incomes of future retirees, “The Canadian National Retirement Index”,  by MacDonald, Moore, Chen and Brown in Canadian Public Policy. It uses the Statistics Canada Life Paths Model to forecast the incomes of future retirees. This greatly amplifies, to my mind, the case for expansion of the Canada Pension Plan and public pensions generally […]

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The NDP on Business Taxes and Jobs

The media coverage of  Layton’s announcement yesterday was disappointingly thin, and the details (including on the NDP web site) are pretty hard to find. The NDP would go one better than the Liberals in raising the Corporate Income Tax rate from 16.5% today (and 15% next year) to the 2008 rate of 19.5%. The Liberals would go back to  18%. […]

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The Small Change EI Premium Rebate

Prime Minister Harper today re-announced the 2011 Budget proposal to introduce a one year program to reduce EI employer premiums by up to $1,000 for small businesses which expand employment in 2011 compared to 2010. I would characterise this as more of a token gift to the Canadian Federation of  Independent Business than a serious job creation measure. The credit […]

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Coalitions and the Economy

(I have also posted this to the new CCPA election blog which plans to run fairly short non technical pieces over the next month.)   Harper’s key framing argument is that a stable majority is needed to maintain an economic recovery which would be derailed by a coalition. I find this more than a little ironic. Canada has indeed had […]

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Cut CPP to Cut the Deficit?

Jeremy Leonard, research director of IRPP, suggests in today’s Globe that CPP retirement benefits be cut to balance the federal books, or at least he is cited to that effect by Barrie McKenna. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t major savings to be wrung out of spending. Mr. Leonard, for example, suggested that reforms to the Canada Pension Plan could achieve […]

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The Political Economy of Birding

My recent post on public sector pay elicited a lot of comments, including a fair few based on the right-wing premise that the public sector is an unproductive burden on the private sector. I have always found this ascription of productivity to the public and private sectors to be deeply misleading in that it conceals the profound interdependence and interpenetration […]

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Minority Workers in the Public Sector

Another reason for that intolerably high public sector compensation premium — Further to my earlier post showing that the public/private sector pay gap is mainly due to more equal pay for women in service jobs,  a recent piece from Canadian Public Policy by Hou and Coulombe shows that the pay gap between Canadian born racialized workers and non racialized workers […]

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Fair Wages and Public Sector Workers

Today’s Globe has a long article by Konrad Yakabuski on the potential for a Wisconsin style attack on Canadian public sector workers. It’s hard to challenge his argument that this is very much in prospect, and indeed we seem set for a debate – or a series of national, provincial and municipal debates – on the allegedly large superiority of pay and […]

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A Part-Time Recovery Ctd.

More from Sylvain: The part-time rate in February 2011 -  19.7% of the workforce working part-time – fell just short of the highest levels ever recorded in July and August 2010. Not only has part-time work risen in the recession and recovery, it has been clearly driven by the lack of full-time jobs. 265,900 non-seasonally adjusted part time jobs were […]

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Today’s Job Numbers: A Part-Time Recovery

Analysis from my colleague Sylvan Schetagne .. The Canadian economy in February 2011 had fewer full-time jobs, but more part-time, self employment and temporary work. These are not signs of a strong job recovery. The unemployment rate remained stable at 7.8%, but job quality decreased significantly last month. The number of full-time jobs was down by 23,800 while part-time work […]

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Gloomy Days Ahead?

I attended an interesting forum on the economic outlook yesterday afternoon. Organized by Canada 2020, the speakers were noted US economist Brad DeLong (UCal Berkley, former senior Treasury official under Clinton, and Paul Krugman soul mate on macro issues at least), and our own David Dodge (who needs no intro.). De Long’s main focus was on the US, and his […]

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The LSE-TMX Deal

I have no informed view on the merits or downsides of this proposed takeover of the Toronto exchange, but find it interesting the degree to which the Canadian corporate and political elites have again  fractured on the issue of foreign ownership of “strategic” assets.  This is an interesting piece from the Financial Times of London.  Most of the banks led […]

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