Two years ago I posted my first guest blog focused on income inequality, specifically how changes in Canada’s redistribution over the last three decades have increased after-tax income inequality, and how these changes compared to OECD trends. The figures and analysis in this post update the earlier blog, based on the most recent OECD data to 2015. I also look […]
Read moreYesterday I spoke on a panel discussion on economic inequality, along with Andrew Jackson and Armine Yalnizyan. We were guests at the federal NDP’s policy convention in Ottawa. The panel was moderated by Guy Caron. Topics covered included the minimum wage, basic income, affordable housing, the future of jobs, gender budgeting, poverty among seniors, Canadian fiscal policy in historical perspective, […]
Read moreIn a recent blog post at Northern Public Affairs, Stephanie Irlbacher-Fox looks at the issue of ‘who gets what?’ when a mine is developed in the Northwest Territories (NWT). Here is an excerpt from the post: – The resource extractor: they pay royalties (the NWT has the lowest royalties in the world), and costs of production, then sell the resource […]
Read moreFurther to Toby’s excellent post on Iceland. Here are some extracts from OECD Country Reviews – courtesy of Roland Schneider of TUAC – which show gross disregard for the risks as they were building. Economic Survey of Iceland 2006 Published on 9 August 2006 Chapter 1: Policy challenges in sustaining improved economic performance Iceland’s growth performance has considerably improved since […]
Read moreI was intrigued by what is happening in Iceland, so the following is a piece I’ve written on it. It has some introductory macro-economics in it, which I think it is good to keep in perspective as we consider the frantic attempts being made to prevent an economic depression. The economic and financial collapse of 2008 is shaping up to be […]
Read moreThere has been so much discussion of income splitting on this blog that we already have two posts entitled “Income Splitting Redux.” Adding to the mix, the Institute for Research on Public Policy has released a major paper by Jon Kesselman on the subject. He cites my Ottawa Citizen op-ed among many other sources. I have not fully read and […]
Read moreThe Nordic Model blog posted this summary of a paper by one of the grand-daddies of Danish flexicurity (blog comments in italics, followed by the text): When Per Kongshøj Madsen, one of the fathers of the flexicurity Danish model, from the CARMA centre of the University of Aalborg, writes an excellent synthesis about flexicurity and the Danish model. You will […]
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 moreJust in from Paris, some fascinating quotables from the OECD: Governments must do more to help workers adapt to new global economy, says OECD Rather than seeing globalisation as a threat, OECD governments should focus on improving labour regulations and social protection systems to help people adapt to changing job markets. That is the message from the 2007 edition of […]
Read moreAs Andrew Jackson points out, there are some interesting musings in the US about progressive taxation. In a recent post, Mark Thoma cites four good reasons for progressive taxation: Personally, I’m not much on redistribution simply to make outcomes more equal. But there are (at least) three reasons to depart from this. First, when there is change such that makes […]
Read moreA lovely counterpoint to last week in Canadian politics on greenhouse gas emission reductions, Kyoto and Minister Baird: Norway Plans to Go ‘Carbon Neutral’ April 20, 2007 — Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg on Thursday proposed to make Norway the first “carbon neutral” state by 2050 and reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 30 percent by 2020. “We are committed […]
Read moreSomething rotten in the state of Denmark? Here’s an interesting take on Copenhagen’s recent youth riots. Anarchy in the DK Jakob Illeborg Copenhagen is burning. For four days the downtown area of the Danish capital has looked like a war zone. At least 690 people have been arrested, many of them younger than 18. As I write, Copenhagen is still […]
Read moreThis afternoon, I attended Kenneth McKenzie’s presentation at Industry Canada on “Taxes, R&D and Enterprise Formation.” To a large extent, it was based on his C. D. Howe Institute Commentary. His main message is that governments seeking to promote R&D can “push” by reducing its cost through incentives (i.e. subsidies) or “pull” by increasing its benefit through lower taxes on […]
Read moreSome factiods on the well-being of children from a recent UNICEF report (hat tip here). The Nordics are generally at the top of the list; Canada is number 12; the US and UK round out the bottom of the 21 countries on the list. Way to go, Scandinavia – with your high taxes, generous social programs and competitive economies – […]
Read moreLast week the Fraser Institute released a report arguing for a shift in Canada’s tax mix that would increase the GST to pay for personal and corporate income tax cuts. The proposal would be a massive gift to the richest among us. It is kind of like asking everyone to make out a cheque for $300 to Jimmy Pattison. Such […]
Read moreA useful piece on the ‘new’ Danish Economy and why it works by Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at the (American) New Republic and a senior fellow at Demos, a US-based national, non-partisan public policy, research and advocacy organization. NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA AWAITS. Great Danes by Jonathan Cohn Post date: 01.03.07 Issue date: 01.15.07 If you want a lower standard […]
Read moreThe CCPA released today a study by Osgoode Hall tax professor Neil Brooks and York’s Thaddeus Hwong called The Social Benefits and Economic Costs of Taxation: A Comparison of High and Low-tax Countries. The study compares 50 indicators of social and economic performance. The full study is available here and a condensed summary follows: Tax levels in Canada have always […]
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 moreHere are two items that go together well. First, here is the most recent tax cut talk from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, as quoted by the Globe and Mail: “I can assure you that our government is by no means finished in our efforts to improve our tax system for the benefit of Canadian families and businesses,†the Conservative […]
Read moreJim Stanford and Stephen Gordon are keeping me busy today. Another missive from Jim Stanford in the Globe prompted this post from Stephen that leads to some interesting points of comparison between the Nordic model and the Canadian status quo: Welfare states can be competitive Jim Stanford sets aside our shared scepticism about the WEF competitiveness rankings to make two […]
Read moreKudos to Norway, already a leader in foreign aid as a share of GDP, for cancelling the bilateral debts of five poor nations. The amount of money is not huge, so one might ask why it has taken this long – the 2000 Jubilee campaign might have been a better time. From the story below, Norway actually seems pretty innocent […]
Read morehttp://www.compassonline.org.uk/publications/good_society/good_society.pdf Compass has just published the first of three short books in an attempt to redefine the social democratic project in the UK. Highly critical of New Labour but strongly influenced by Scandinavian social democracy, Compass is advancing themes and policies which will resonate on the progressive left in Canada – a relentless focus on equalizing the life-chances of all […]
Read moreAnother 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 […]
Read moreOK, 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 […]
Read moreThis 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 […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail’s Neil Reynolds does a hatchet job on Sweden. Alas, conservatives have called for the end of the Swedish welfare state for a long time, and this smear job may postpone the day that Canadians start looking at Sweden as a model we may want to emulate. Truth be told, I have never been to Sweden (though […]
Read moreNeoclassical economics, when looking at the labour market, plots its supply and demand curves, with all of their loaded and unrealistic assumptions, and finds an equilibrium wage and employment. Then it finds that anything added on to this simplistic and flawed model – taxation, unions, minimum wages – perturbs that equilibrium. Therefore those things must be bad! A new paper […]
Read moreIf you listen to the Fraser Institute or like-minded think-tanks on the right, high taxes kill incentives to work and invest. They argue that Canada needs to lower its taxes in order to produce higher rates of economic growth. By their logic, the Scandinavian countries, all of whom have levels of taxes relative to GDP substantially higher than Canada’s, ought […]
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