Riddle: When is a Liberal budget, not really a Liberal budget? Answer: When big business loves it! There’s a fascinating sidebar to Jim Flaherty’s big-spending vote-buying budget last week, in the strongly favourable reaction which it received from the business community. All the pundits’ complaints about the budget being “more Liberal than the Liberals” are actually welcomed by the Tories, […]
Read moreI shared the podium recently in Sydney with Neal Lawson, who is the chairperson for a very interesting U.K. initiative called Compass.  As far as I can tell, Compass is kind of a cross between a think-tank and an activist network. Its explicit goal has been to challenge the right-wing policies of the New Labour leadership. It functions largely, but […]
Read moreThe CAW has merged with about 35 smaller unions since we were formed in 1985. That doesn’t stop me, however, from questioning the economic usefulness of Canadian corporate mergers. M&A activity last year reached an incredible $270 billion. That’s 20 percent of our GDP. And what good actually comes from it? At best, the M&A boom is a sideshow. At […]
Read moreMy note on the weak investment spending of Canadian businesses earlier this week sparked several comments, including one from me on the methodological problems encountered in trying to measure “real†investment effort. Here’s some more grist for the mill of how we understand “nominal†versus “real†business investment. Point 1 is empirical, and Point 2 is more theoretical. 1. Capital […]
Read moreIn neoclassical economic theory, corporations are supposed to “work”, just like the rest of us do. Their economic function is to organize production, innovate, and grow. This process, when it happens well, generates jobs and incomes (which is not to say there are not better ways to generate jobs and incomes). One way to measure the “work” of corporations is […]
Read moreIt was a ho-hum announcement, and I don’t know if it generated much media coverage in Canada or not. But last week the Bank of Canada and the Dept. of Finance announced another 5-year extension (to 2011) of the current inflation targeting regime (keep total year-over-year inflation within a point above or below 2 percent, using the core inflation rate […]
Read moreI visited China for two weeks earlier this month, at the invitation of the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing. I gave a series of lectures on economics and labour relations to several classes of bright, eager, and surprisingly free-speaking graduate students. China’s economy has been growing at about 10% per year for over a decade, and the […]
Read moreHi Everyone… I promised I’d provide more details on our great debate with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade regarding trade economics, in particular the likely employment effects of their proposed Canada-Korea FTA. The federal critique variously described the CAW study (which predicted significant post-FTA job losses in the auto industry and other high-value sectors) with the following […]
Read moreWhen I was growing up on the farm in Alberta, our family had a saying: “If you throw something out into the dark and hear a squeal, it means you hit the pig.” (OK, I didn’t really grow up on a farm in Alberta. But I visited one once.) That’s how I feel about the Department of Foreign Affairs and […]
Read moreWhaddya make of Jeffrey Sachs these days? He was the guy, was he not, who brought free-market shock therapy to Russia and Eastern Europe. But today he is out there championing the virtues of the welfare state. Here’s a recent missive from no less than Scientific American (Oct 16 2006 edition). It sounds just like what me and Marc Lee […]
Read moreEvery now and then you see a sad story on TV about someone who won the lottery, and then their life went to shit (they gave it all away or lost it gambling, became an alcoholic, etc.). They invariably say at the end, “I wish I’d never won the lottery.” I kind of feel the same way about oil. I […]
Read moreA few posts back, Marc Lee was discussing the Harper government’s sudden discovery of the dangers of global warming. He mentioned in passing reports that the CAW was opposed to the idea of stronger emissions regulations for vehicles. In fact the CAW has been in support of the Kyoto process, Canadian efforts to meet its targets, and the principle of […]
Read moreA couple of weeks ago, I suggested that someone ought to publish a comparative ranking of OECD countries by productivity per HOUR of work (rather than the more common, but utterly misleading, measure of GDP per capita). Turns out the Economic Policy Institute in Washington has done exactly that in their latest version of their flagship publication, “State of Working […]
Read moreI got a chuckle from the letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail that was a response to my recent column on the Harper government’s efforts to sign more free trade deals. Here is the letter: KEN RITTER CHAIR , BOARD OF DIRECTORS and CANADIAN WHEAT BOARD Winnipeg — Jim Stanford asks: Why The Rush To Ink More […]
Read moreI wrote a recent column for the Globe and Mail on the issue of working hours. 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). In the Institute’s view, this makes Ontarians $3700 less “prosperous” per year […]
Read moreHere was 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 “consummates†another deal by Sept. 7.” These merger and takeover battles […]
Read moreby Jim Stanford We all know that private companies are efficient, because they are forced to be by the discipline of the free market. Companies which do not operate efficiently will be driven out of business by those that do. This creative destruction will leave us all better off (abstracting from adjustment costs): higher productivity, cheaper, higher quality products and […]
Read moreby Jim Stanford I’ve now been in Melbourne Australia for one month of my 12-month sabbattical. It’s always interesting for an economist to live somewhere else and compare the micro-minutae of life. It’s a sure-fire way to drive your travelling partners nuts. Here are my main impressions of economic life on the bottom side of the planet so far: 1. […]
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