It’s not often that I get my hopes up about a potential volte-face in the way we talk and think about economics at the policy and political level but this is by far the best news I’ve heard in a long long time. It seems that our very own Jamie Galbraith, scion of John Kenneth Galbraith and keynote speaker for […]
Read moreThe CCPA have posted to their web site Armine Yalnizyan’s excellent presentation to last week’s CLC Convention: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/Reports/2008/06/ReportsStudies1900/index.cfm
Read moreAs highlighted in the most recent version of the OECD Jobs Study, Denmark has recently managed to combine a very egalitarian distribution of wages and incomes with excellent employment and economic performance. The Danish “flexicurity†model gives the great majority of workers decent wages and working conditions, achieved though very high levels of unionization, very high unemployment benefits as a […]
Read moreAn interesting paper: Controversies about the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey by Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~idew/papers/BPEA_final_ineq.pdf Abstract This paper provides a comprehensive survey on six aspects of rising inequality: changes in laborÂfs share, inequality at the bottom, inequality at the top, labor mobility, inequality in consumption as contrasted to inequality of income, and international differences in […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/policy_papers I commend to your attention the policy papers which will be presented for discussion and debate at the CLC Convention, which convenes the week after next in Toronto. Progressive economists Mike McCracken and Armine Yalnizyan will help kick-off discussion on the Good Jobs and Growing Gap papers respectively. Though neither they nor the progressive economics community had a direct […]
Read moreWith credit to Edward Sussex who sends this summary ” This UNDP-IPC paper concludes that the real per capita income of the vast majority or the first eighty per cent of any nation (vast majority income – VMIpc), is of particular interest in comparing the income levels and income inequality of countries. It finds that average income measures are not […]
Read moreBrowsing through the letters to the editor in the two big Vancouver dailies this morning, I came across a letter from BC Premier Gordon Campbell responding to the recent Census findings of declining median incomes for workers in this province. The letter was published in both newspapers: a longer version under “Purchasing power and globalization” in the Vancouver Sun and […]
Read moreThere is an interesting opinion piece in The Tyee this morning, aptly named Dying for the Rich, which points out the links between inequality and life expectancy. The article’s author, Crawford Kilian, should be praised for bringing up an angle that was virtually ignored by media commentators in their coverage of the recent Census findings of growing inequality, even by […]
Read moreI just got back from a week in New York City with my wife, in which, among other things, we went to see five Broadway shows (I know the best way to get cheap tickets now). It was during the intermission to Rent that it finally hit me that something must be done about a fundamental injustice in our society. […]
Read moreMarc recently trumpeted this blog for being ahead of the public debate on several economic issues. However, we have perhaps been slightly behind the curve in commenting on yesterday’s release of income statistics from the 2006 Census. It indicated that, from 1980 through 2005, the median income among full-time Canadian workers remained flat. The median income of the top fifth rose by […]
Read moreI’ve pasted in below my contribution to the latest issue of Canada Watch, edited by my old friend Danny Drache of the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Toronto. It’s part of a special issue on what Deep Integration of North America could look like with George W. Bush out of the way. Here’s the link to […]
Read more A good one from Eric Beauchesne on the Canwest wire. Some highlights: Canada’s wealthy benefit most from tax cuts, OECD finds The tax burden on wages has eased in most of the world’s industrial countries this decade, including here, but Canada is among a minority where most of the relief has gone to high-income earners and the least to lower-income […]
Read moreIf anyone had any doubt…
Read moreI want to piggy-back very briefly on Marc’s post from Tuesday (and update yesterday) which suggested that the proposed Tax-Free Savings Account won’t “promote investment” like the government says it will (see page 76 of Budget). The empirical literature I’ve seen certainly supports his argument — most corporate investment is financed from retained earnings, which in turn suggests that consumption, […]
Read moreRichard Ziegler has recently written and published a book called “Reclaiming The Canadian Left” which is worth a read. For details see http://www.richardziegler.ca/ He argues that the Canadian left has largely renounced economic equality as a goal. I’m broadly sympathetic to his argument that the left has indeed abandoned the radically egalitarian vision which Ziegler espouses, and he did touch […]
Read moreYet another StatsCan study to confirm ever-increasing inequality over a period of falling unemployment – this time measured in terms of changes in real hourly wages over the past decade, 1997-2007, based on Labour Force Survey data. Earnings in the Last Decade by Rene Morissette. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75-001-XIE/2008102/pdf/10521-en.pdf Among the highlights: Real Average hourly earnings (AHE) of private sector employees rose by […]
Read moreA good piece by novelist John Lanchester from the London Review of Books – on the City (London finance), inequality, and the credit crisis. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n01/lanc01_.html
Read moreJared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute on just released US data which show a rather starting further increase in US income inequality – apparently the top 1% of families there now get 19% of all after tax income and average over $1 Million apiece. Looks like a blog to monitor, for those who want to follow dismal and other […]
Read moreNiels Veldhuis of the Fraser Institute takes me to task today in a Letter to the Editor in response to the story, ‘Tax the rich more in Canada, study urges” (Nanaimo Daily News, Dec. 12). He claims that “the story focusing on the report by Canadian Labour Congress economist Andrew Jackson is seriously misleading… the report conveniently ignores the impact […]
Read moreCanWest ran a good summary of my study for the CCPA, “Why Charity Isn’t Enough: The Case for Raising Taxes on Canada’s Rich” released today. (pasted in below) Adding to Marc Lee’s recent work on tax incidence, my piece documents the fact that recent changes to personal income taxes in Canada have compounded rather than offset increased ‘top tail’ driven […]
Read moreThere’s quite an interesting piece on pension coverage in today’s Daily from StatCan. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75-001-XIE/2007111/articles/10405high-en.htm The study suggests that some of the statistical series showing sharply declining pension coverage are rather suspect, and they provide a series from tax data showing the proportion of taxfilers with a positive pension adjustment. This is a larger number than contributors to registered pension plans, […]
Read moreAs reported in yesterday’s Globe ROB p.1, Merill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal seems set to be the fall guy for his firm losing Billions on asset-backed securities. That sounds like bad news for him. But news of his pending departure drove up Merrill shares, giving Mr O’Neal a paper gain of $16 Million on his stock and option holdings of […]
Read moreThomas Palley, formerly of the AFL-CIO, just posted a very good piece on “The New Economics of Trade” that clearly connects the dots between several themes frequently discussed on this blog.
Read moreStatistics Canada today released an excellent study of high incomes and inequality - http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070924/d070924a.htm Thanks to Michael Wolfson, Brian Murphy and Paul Roberts for getting this powerful data out into the light of day. No big surprises here – the top end grabs a disproportionate share of all income, and their share has been growing apace. The tax data used […]
Read moreOn Monday, Ontario’s Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity released a paper entitled, Prosperity, Inequality, and Poverty. As Andrew Sharpe pointed out in a review of Jack Mintz’s book, free-market “policy entrepreneurs” often completely ignore the distributional consequences of their recommendations. The Institute deserves credit for trying to grapple with distributional issues (and also for quoting Sharpe extensively). The Institute observes […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/updir/Working_People_Deserve_More_Paid_Vacation.pdf Here’s the link to a mini study on statutory rights to paid vacation timey just posted to the CLC web site – we fall well short of European standards and there is a surprising amount of variation in Canada.
Read moreThe US National Bureau of Economic Research have just published a fascinating dissection of top income earners, the ones we know have grabbed a rapidly escalating share of all income. This study provides a wealth of detail on the incomes of those we would suspect to be in the top 0.1% or higher (in 2004 the top 0.1% of US […]
Read moreThe Wellesley Institute blog compares and contrasts a recent CCPA publication with the World Wealth Report: Two days, two reports, two very different worlds The World Wealth Report 2007 released on Wednesday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini reports that the very rich (so-called high net worth individuals – HNWI) are getting even richer. And the forecast is the extremely […]
Read moreStephen Gordon’s presentation from our PEF “taxation and social democracy” session at the CEA meetings is now online at his blog, here. The other presenters on the panel were Andrew Jackson, Erin Weir and Marion Steele. I was the discussant for the session, so I will take Stephen’s cue and jot down some of the things I thought most noteworthy […]
Read moreI’m not a big fan of business journalism. For the most part, it’s a lazy, sycophantic, uninspired, biased, occasionally self-interested (in a conflict-of-interest sense) and worse yet, boring business. I should know, I was once part of the fold. In my experience, at least half of financial journalists are in it for the food (gotta love annual report/annual meeting season […]
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