I 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 moreThe only surprise in the long-term economic strategy document unveiled by the Finance Minister today is its complete lack of balance. Everything corporate Canada and the right-wing think-tanks wanted is there in spades. What it lacks is any sense that the market economy must be regulated in the public interest to make sure that it works for working families. Consider […]
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 morehttp://www.upjohninst.org/publications/newsletter/TJB_1006.pdf In a major study for the Upjohn Institute, Timothy J. Bartik calulates the macro economic impacts of high quality universal preschool education for the US, based mainly on studies of the impacts of a well-studied, high quality program (the Chicago Child-Parent Centre program, a half day program for four year olds with 2 teachers per 20 children.) He estimates […]
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 moreThis is bad news indeed. Right-wingers are no strangers to the hallowed halls of the Department of Finance (Jack Mintz held this position in the past before heading off to the CD Howe Institute), but for my money Crowley is much more a Fraser Institute clone right-wing ideologue than credible professional economist. He has been a strong opponent of minimum […]
Read moreWe all suffer when greed is the creed http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1939867,00.html If you doubt the malign effects of big business out of control, consider Conrad Black’s downfall Will Hutton Sunday November 5, 2006 The Observer There has rarely been a better time to be a plutocrat. This is an unrivalled era in which both to acquire great wealth and keep it. Taxation […]
Read moreMonday’s release by the UK government of the Stern Review on The Economics of Climate Change could come to be seen as one of those pivotal events in shaping public policy. I hope so, anyway. This report takes the accumulation of scientific knowledge about the present and potential future impacts of global warming and translates them into the language of […]
Read morehttp://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/agency/stats/final-e.html Here’s the link to the historical income tax data which some people asked for. The most recent year for which full data seem to be available is 2003 (or the links don’t work for 2004 tax year.) In an earlier post, I suggested that the “puzzling” excess of personal income tax revenue growth over personal income growth likely reflected […]
Read moreIn a joint statement issued on Wednesday, October 11, five Nobel Prize winners and over 650 other economists endorsed a statement urging a raise in the minimum wage. The statement asserts that a modest raise in the minimum wage (in the range of a $1.00 to $2.50 per hour), with future increases indexed to protect the workers’ purchasing power, “can […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/jobs__economy/1021 Here’s the link to a paper we (the Canadian Labour Congress) released this week, and which was the background paper for an Ontario Federation of Labour conference. The recommendations are a work in progress among union economists, and comments on them would be welcome.
Read moreThis is a column by Kim Pollock of the Steelworkers (ex IWA) in BC re the recent US Trade Court Ruling. I was out of the country at the time, but it strikes me that the basic issue (an un-necesary softwood lumber deal) has been incredibly ignored by the mainstream national media. Our lumber industry is about to be hammered […]
Read morehttp://www.socialreport.msd.govt.nz/ This is worth a look as a serious attempt at an “official” social audit. A good selection of economic and social indicators, and what is interesting is that the report highlights some progessive benchmarks and targets, and some not terribly impressive performance. A brave government indeed, compared to our own.
Read moreAs noted in today’s Globe and Mail, income tax revenue growth is significantly exceding GDP growth, surprising Don Drummond of TD Bank. My guess is that current income growth is highly tilted to the very high end of the income distribution, where it is taxed at well above average rates. A quick glance at the revenue stats for the past […]
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 moreRecently in Paris for meetings between the OECD Economic Department and TUAC (the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD), I found my trade union colleagues concerned about the “downside†risks of an increasingly gloomy economic outlook. The OECD Economics Department believes that there will be a pronounced slowdown in the US – driven by the housing downturn. However, it […]
Read moreChallenges Facing the Canadian Manufacturing Sector – Interim Report of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology http://cmte.parl.gc.ca/cmte/CommitteePublication.aspx?COM=10476&Lang=1&SourceId=149639 This short report briefly analyzes some of the dynamics behind the manufacturing crisis, and summarizes policy recommendations presented to date (mainly by business associations.) It reveals some interesting tensions within the “business community.†The key factors behind the […]
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 moreThe push for “competitiveness” is often framed around differences in corporate taxation. Our tax rates, it is argued, must be equivalent to or less than those of our competitors so that we can attract the investment we need to increase our standard of living. There is some truth to that in that if our taxes were way out of line […]
Read moreJust weeks ago it was Telus that was the biggest ever conversion to an income trust. Now BCE jumps to the top. This mania for income trusts has me wondering how the rash of conversions from corporate entities to income trusts can make good economic sense. Income trusts are clearly a vehicle by which corporate taxes can be avoided, that […]
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 moreThe prospect of a free trade deal with South Korea has set off a mini-debate at Stephen Gordon’s Worthwhile Canadian Initiative. Jim Stanford’s column in the Globe prompted this post from Stephen: Mercantilism at the Globe and Mail Courtesy of Jim Stanford: Why the rush to ink more deals? Where free trade is concerned, Canada is getting worse with practice: […]
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 moreThe 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics goes to Edmund Phelps. (Technically, this is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, because Nobel did not actually endow a prize in economics back in 1901; the economics prize was added in 1968.) The essay accompanying the prize can be found here. Below I’ve pasted two differing econo-blog […]
Read more“We are not acquisitive automatons conditioned always to follow narrow self-interest.” So says the UK’s The Times in an article on “neuro-economics”, a sub-field of economics that bridges psychology and neurology in an attempt to understand human behaviour. Alas, rather than an empirical approach to human behaviour, the economics profession has been willing to make the huge assumption about human […]
Read moreAgainst the backdrop of fears of a slowing economy, today’s job numbers for the month of September are superficially re-assuring. The national unemployment rate is down slightly, from 6.5% to 6.4%, and total employment is up by 16,000. However, the fall in the unemployment rate is partly driven by a decline in the total work-force. Most importantly, there are signs […]
Read more This paper is a useful corrective to some of the more apocalyptic projections of looming generalized labour shortages in the US, Canada and elsewhere. One of Freeman’s key points is that we should not care about a decline of GDP growth, only about GDP per capita, and that we should focus more on increasing productivity than on increased labour supply. […]
Read moreHere’s a post from Economist’s View starting with a novel argument against single payer health insurance: that it would hurt innovation. Mark Thoma then rebuts and throws in some Paul Krugman for safe measure. Krugman makes an important point that often we assume that innovation is always a good thing. True, some innovations lead to better health outcomes. Others do […]
Read moreSince it appears to be drug day at RPE, I should mention as a follow-up to a previous post on the National Pharmaceuticals Strategy that I did track down the document in question, a NPS Progress Report, and that the Globe reporter did indeed misrepresent the estimates of the cost of that program. The Globe stated that the Report “pegs […]
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