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 moreAs foreshadowed last week and reported below, Flaherty has narrowed non-deductibility to apply only to interest already deducted abroad and delayed its implementation for five years. In other words, corporations will generally be allowed to deduct foreign-affiliate interest costs in Canada even though they generally do not pay Canadian tax on their foreign-affiliate income. Flaherty retreats on tax measure, but […]
Read moreLike so many commentators on this topic, Andrew Coyne attacks the inefficiency and absurdity of alleged “internal trade barriers†without actually naming any. He could presumably trot out the two or three usual suspects, but does he believe that Canada’s “economic union†depends upon the colour of margarine in Quebec? Coyne writes that, “Viewed strictly as a legal matter, the […]
Read moreSince I first posted about Alcan on May 1, it has certainly become more newsworthy! The Canadian Labour Congress sent the following letter to the Prime Minister yesterday. I will appear on “Goldhawk Live” to discuss the issue on Sunday at 8pm EST. Hopefully, the letter and I are more coherent than Tuesday’s Globe and Mail editorial, which decried “Ottawa’s […]
Read moreWhen the Canadian Labour Congress comments on the Labour Force Survey, the interests we represent and the policy agenda we hope to advance is quite explicit. When banks comment, they are generally treated as neutral observers. However, banks are powerful economic actors with major economic interests. In April, full-time, paid jobs disappeared, unemployment rose and people withdrew from the labour […]
Read moreBy walking out on Gordon Laxer’s testimony about the SPP’s potential impact on Canadian energy security, the Conservatives have given him far more media coverage than he otherwise might have received. Today, the following story appeared in The Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen and The Edmonton Journal: Tory chair storms out of SPP hearing Freezing in the dark ‘not relevant’ to […]
Read moreI just appeared on CJOB radio in Winnipeg. Richard Cloutier asked me about the national manufacturing crisis, but not much about Manitoba in particular. I was, of course, delighted to speak about one of the CLC’s main concerns. However, in looking at Manitoba’s numbers before the interview, I noticed that this province is bucking the national trend in an important […]
Read moreToday’s Labour Force Survey indicates that Canada lost 28,000 paid positions in April and that more people are unemployed. But Statistics Canada’s release began as follows: Estimates from Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) showed little overall change in employment in April. This follows strong employment gains since September 2006. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate remained at an historic 33-year low […]
Read moreFollowing the lead of several American municipalities, Maryland has become the first state to mandate a “living wage” for government contractors. Larger businesses working on larger contracts will have to pay at least $11.30/hour in urban areas and $8.50/hour in rural areas. While this bill is no substitute for an adequate minimum wage covering all workers, it is a positive […]
Read moreRecently, CLC President Ken Georgetti sent the following letter to Jim Flaherty: May 8, 2007 Honourable Jim Flaherty, P.C., M.P. Minister of Finance House of Commons Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6 Dear Minister: On behalf of the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), I write to express our support for your promise, in Budget 2007, to end the corporate-tax deduction for interest on […]
Read moreI lumped it up yesterday when my fill-up closed at just shy of $50. After all, gas should be expensive, as a means of encouraging us to drive less. But what if the main reason for the hefty increases is gouging by oil and gas companies? It’s one thing for governments to reap the gains of higher prices if they […]
Read moreUBC’s Max Cameron (who wrote a great book on NAFTA back in the day) looks at endemic corruption in Latin America; in this case, a Peruvian congresswoman who put her maid on congressional payroll as a “political advisor”. (As an aside, those back east might be interested to learn about a major corruption trial underway in BC right now involving […]
Read moreTrue to form, the Liberals will put forward a motion tomorrow calling for the tax-deductibility of foreign-affiliate interest and for lower taxes on income trusts in the name of economic nationalism. UPDATE (May 10): The Canadian Labour Congress has released a letter opposing the motion.
Read moreA dispatch from Ellen Gould that is a bit nebulous on the surface: Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua are withdrawing from the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). Ellen explains: It’s a little bit complicated to understand why this is such fantastically positive news, but this development basically means Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are making it far more difficult […]
Read moreLAUREL 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 moreWhat follows are the Chair’s conclusions from the G8 Employment Minister’s Conference in Dresden. I post this as an expample of the current conventional wisdom of social and labour market policy (which has changed a bit for the good in the wake of the most recent OECD JObs Studay) and as an aide memoire that Canada signed on to a […]
Read moreIt looks as though Jim Flaherty’s strange journey around the tax-deductibility of interest on loans to finance foreign affiliates is about to end badly. The following story seems to confirm that, under pressure from big business and the Liberals, he is set for “a complete reversal of the budget announcement”: Flaherty retreats from tax deduction on foreign investment loans Eric […]
Read moreSince 2002, almost 250,000 manufacturing workers have lost their jobs because of the high dollar and our huge and growing trade deficit with developing Asian countries. Many are older workers who will typically face a long stretch of unemployment, followed by employment in a new job at much lower wages. Our Employment Insurance (EI) program still provides an important income […]
Read moreYesterday’s International Merchandise Trade Annual Review from StatsCan confirms the Mel Watkins thesis that Canada is rapidly reverting to its historical role as a commodity producer for the global economy. http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070508/d070508a.htm From 2002, the Canadian dollar began to appreciate rapidly against the US dollar (and Asian currencies tied to the US dollar) in response to a commodity price boom, itself […]
Read moreIn our paper, Putting Canadians at Risk, Bruce Campbell and I feared that lowering our regulatory standards would inevitably happen under the banner of “regulatory cooperation” with the US, something senior government officials think is just great. While this might look like typical Harper policy, it is really just a continuation of an initiative that gained steam under the Martin […]
Read moreMore 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 more“Within the bank’s powerful executive board, support for Mr Wolfowitz has narrowed to just three countries – the US, Japan and Canada, although both the Japanese and Canadian governments have recently come under domestic pressure to withdraw their backing.” Â From today’s Guardian story on the imminent demise of the nepotistic neo con. http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2074592,00.htmlÂ
Read moreSo just as I was about to leave to give a lecture on taxes (and why high tax Nordic countries are not in economic ruins), my tax return for 2006 arrived in the mail. This is truly good news because I got a big refund. In all, I paid about 20% of my income in taxes last year, which seems […]
Read moreIn a column written before this weekend’s presidential run-offs, Mark Weisbrot unspins the misleading numbers behind the French elections: Economic Misinformation Plays a Major Role in French Election The elections in France demonstrate the power of faulty economic analysis, and more generalized problems with arithmetic, to shape ideas and possibly the future of not only a nation, but a continent. […]
Read moreUnfortunately, it looks like the Finance Minister may be folding on foreign-affiliate interest-deductibility.
Read morePerhaps telegraphing some of his coming remarks in Halifax when he joins the Progressive Economics Forum for the inauguration of the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics, James Galbraith reflects on his father’s The New Industrial State. If you find yourself in Halifax on June 3, noon, please join us at Dalhousie’s McCain Building, Room 2017 (note this is a […]
Read moreDani 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 moreThe following, from today’s Toronto Star, includes some commentary from yours truly: The China syndrome: A new condition characterized by the apparent reluctance of a certain national government to embrace an emerging, global economic power May 05, 2007
Read moreMarc’s recent post prompted me to look at transcripts from the Senate hearings on “issues dealing with interprovincial barriers to trade.” The following passage caught my attention: The Chairman: Let me suggest something that tantalized me when I first looked at this question well over 30 years ago, and more recently — the economics of it. I think one of […]
Read moreAsking business whether to get rid of government regulations is much like asking a barber whether to get a haircut. Nevertheless, the Conference Board’s main (and only) evidence in projecting TILMA’s benefits for BC and Saskatchewan were surveys of business organizations and government departments. In our paper, Marc and I noted some serious problems with the BC survey as well […]
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