Comparative Advantage Meets Capital Mobility
Thomas 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.
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The Exploding Canadian Income Gap
Statistics 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 moreCompetitiveness Meets Poverty and Inequality
On 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 moreWorking People Deserve More Paid Vacation
http://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 moreA Profile of Very High Income Earners in the US
The 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 moreWho’s Better, Who’s Best
The 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 morePEF session on taxation and social democracy
Stephen 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 moreFortune Magazine’s Plutocracy index
I’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 […]
Read moreImmigration and Wages
A study released by Statistics Canada today concludes that “Immigration has tended to lower wages in both Canada and the United States.” Of course, immigration is but one of many influences on wages and class divisions are of far greater economic significance than any supposed conflict between immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Nevertheless, this issue has the potential to be quite […]
Read moreWe Are The Champions! (Except for Iceland)
Having just finished arguing that inequality is an inevitable result of personal marriage decisions, William Watson has declared Canadians the “strike champs” of the OECD in today’s Financial Post. A new British study suggests that labour disputes cost about 200 days per 1,000 workers per year in Canada, which is apparently far more than in most OECD countries. Four thoughts […]
Read moreBusiness Week: The Poverty Business
While William Watson and Margaret Wente are shrugging their shoulders at growing inequality in Canada, and endorsing policies that would make our income distribution more like that of our southern neighbour, concerns in the US about rising inequality are actually getting a better hearing. An example is the following article in Business Week (The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies’ audacious […]
Read moreFamily Income Inequality
Further to my earlier post re Margaret Wente on Inequality http://progecon.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/margaret-wente-and-inequality/ the Ottawa Citizen ran two letters today, from Armine Yalnizyan and myself, responding to Bill Watson’s similar view that we can’t do anything about inequality since it is driven by personal marital choices. The Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Re: Why we need more Pretty […]
Read moreMargaret Wente and Inequality
I highly recommend a new StatsCan (Andrew Heisz) study of income inequality and redistribution – with one significant quibble. Heisz confirms a great deal of what we know – family after tax income inequality has been growing apace in the 1990s, driven above all by increased inequality of market income. http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2007298.pdf This is a methodologically sophisticated study. It confirms the […]
Read moreChild poverty – this is not as good as it gets
LAUREL ROTHMAN AND ARMINE YALNIZYAN Special to Globe and Mail Update May 8, 2007 at 12:37 AM EDT Canada‘s child and family poverty rate is down to 11.7 per cent in the latest Statistics Canada report, released last week. So why aren’t anti-poverty activists breaking out the bubbly? Because that rate is exactly what it was in 1989, when parliamentarians […]
Read moreInequality in Ontario
More good work from the CCPA: Ontario’s rich-poor gap is huge: study Report shows wealthiest 10% earn 75 times more than poorest 10% April Lindgren The Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, May 08, 2007 Â TORONTO – The income gap between Ontario’s richest and poorest families is greater than ever before and the most pronounced in the country, according to a study […]
Read morePoor in a rich country or rich in a poor country?
Dani Rodrik says it is much better to be poor in a rich country than it is to be rich in a poor country (top and bottom deciles, that is, for “rich” and “poor”): The correct answer is that a poor person in a rich country is three times better off than a rich person in a poor country (given […]
Read moreClimate change winners and losers
The New York Times reports on the inequities generated by global warming below. The April edition of The Atlantic also featured a story on the same theme, but it was really poorly done. While the article makes a few interesting observations of what might happen in different parts of the world, Gregg Easterbrook, from Brookings, was more inclined to treat […]
Read moreThe equity considerations of congestion pricing
Lance Freeman of Columbia University argues against congestion pricing: The Equity Considerations of Congestion Pricing Getting stuck in traffic is fast becoming one of those necessary evils that everyone complains about but seldom does anything about it. Or at least anything that seems terribly effective. Neither additional road building nor public transit seemed to have had a major impact on […]
Read moreWorking Income Tax Benefit
From the Toronto Star March 23, 2007, p. A21. Working poor get little relief from Flaherty Upon closer inspection, the Conservative finance minister’s Working Income Tax Benefit falls way short of the original proposal first floated by his Liberal predecessor Ralph Goodale, notes John Stapleton March 23, 2007 There was much anticipation that the latest federal budget would […]
Read moreKrugman: America’s Disappearing Middle Class
From the keynote speech delivered by Paul Krugman at the Economic Policy Institute’s recent conference on The Agenda for Shared Prosperity: A History of America’s Disappearing Middle Class By Paul Krugman …One thing I’ve been noticing on multiple debates in public policies — climate change is another one — is there seems to be an almost seamless transition from denial […]
Read more35,000 Manufacturing Jobs Gone in One Month
This morning, Statistics Canada released its Labour Force Survey figures for February. My analysis, which was included in the CLC’s press release, follows: Manufacturing Crisis Deepens Canada lost 35,000 manufacturing jobs between January and February. This staggering one-month decline pushes the cumulative loss to 250,000 since Canadian manufacturing peaked in November 2002. Most of February’s devastating decline took place in […]
Read moreMore progressive economics
Announcing the Center for the Applied Study of Economics & the Environment, a new US grouping of progressive economists. Here is their manifesto: Real People, Real Environments, and Realistic Economics The wealth and power of humanity in the 21st century could be used to create a far better world. We write as economists who are troubled by environmental degradation and […]
Read moreReview of “Dimensions of Inequality in Canada”
Published in The Tyee, as Divided, We’re Falling: Book Review of Dimensions of Inequality in Canada Edited by David A. Green and Jonathan R. Kesselman UBC Press ISBN 0-7748-1208-7 August 2006 http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=4518 Review by Marc Lee A poll last Fall by Environics for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that three-quarters of Canadians felt that the gap between rich […]
Read moreGalbraith on US inequality
Another teaser from James Galbraith, who will be joining us at the Canadian Economics Association meetings to inaugurate the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics, and will also be presenting on a panel on inequality. His presentation might go something like this: Bush’s beltway boom By James K. Galbraith The rise of the Democrats brings some much-needed attention to […]
Read moreMore “truthiness” from the John Ibbitson
Yesterday, the CCPA released a study on inequality filled with statistics about how life has changed for families with children. John Ibbitson shrugs his shoulders and responds with a polemic. He provides some “balance” by trashing right-wing think tanks, too, but in typical Ibbitson fashion provides not a shred of evidence for anything he says. Here’s the column and some […]
Read moreThe growing gap and Canadian families
The CCPA released a study today, part of a mega-project on inequality in Canada, looking at changes in income and work hours for Canadian families with children. The report, by Armine Yalnizyan, finds that the top 10% are pulling away. While the report looks at distribution by deciles, it would be interesting to pull a Saez and Veall, to see […]
Read moreRelative Low Wages in Canada
I just received my 2006 issue of Society at a Glance: OECD Social Indicators. (Best seen in living colour!) The OECD now regularly reports systematic national indicators of earnings inequality (Table EQ2.1). I have made wide use in the past of data for the mid to late 1990s circulated in the OECD Employment Outlook, which are now dated. The new […]
Read moreBen Bernanke Speaks Out on Inequality
 An interesting and informed reflection on the sources of rising inequality - seen as not reducible to “skill biased technological change”, with the usual cop out that almost all of the answer lies in education and training. http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2007/20070206/default.htm Remarks by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke Before the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Omaha, Nebraska February 6, 2007 The Level and Distribution […]
Read moreChanneling Marx
As we have been hearing about the legacies of the great minds of economics, a name that has not cropped up much lately is Marx. The first article below suggests that Marx’s ideas live with us in the global economy, and growing inequality has awoken the old guy’s spirit. With it we are seeing a resurgence of the word “capitalism” […]
Read more“Wealthy Taxpayers Seem to Be Getting Wealthier” says OECD
The December, 2006 OECD Economic Outlook (full text unavailable on line) points to sudden tax revenue windfalls in most member countries due to large capital gains and the fact that “the process of income and wealth distributions becoming more skewed has picked up pace lately …. and may be interacting with progressive tax systems to produce more than usual increases […]
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