Just 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 […]
Read moreToday’s Globe and Mail features two excellent articles about drugs in Canada. The first makes some great points about what might be possible with a national pharmacare plan and how politics is getting in the way of doing the right thing. The second is about how profit-seeking by pharmaceutical companies is distorting the cost of treatment. In this case, doctors […]
Read moreA good piece from today’s Toronto Star by CCPA economist Ellen Russell on the erosion of federal fiscal capacity by recent tax cuts. Pressures to cut social spending are growing, compounded by a marked federal government shift to “security expenditure.” It’s a bit harder to figure out the best left response given that itt’s trickier politically to impose a tax […]
Read moreThe BC government has introduced a new program to address the crisis in housing affordability: rent supplements. Over the past five years, the BC government has stopped building affordable housing for low income people. There has been new federal money for this purpose but the government has used that money to build “assisted living” spaces for seniors (properly part of […]
Read more“Canada’s New Government†says that it wants to focus on “the productivity agenda.†But they seem unable to look beyond partisan considerations to make the rather obvious link between investment in skills, and building a more productive economy. The previous Liberal government had just begun to slowly re-invest in worker training and adult learning after years of federal cuts, devolution […]
Read moreA couple of weeks ago, I suggested that someone ought to publish a comparative ranking of OECD countries by productivity per HOUR of work (rather than the more common, but utterly misleading, measure of GDP per capita). Turns out the Economic Policy Institute in Washington has done exactly that in their latest version of their flagship publication, “State of Working […]
Read moreI got a chuckle from the letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail that was a response to my recent column on the Harper government’s efforts to sign more free trade deals. Here is the letter: KEN RITTER CHAIR , BOARD OF DIRECTORS and CANADIAN WHEAT BOARD Winnipeg — Jim Stanford asks: Why The Rush To Ink More […]
Read moreJoseph Stiglitz takes on the matter of global imbalances with some thoughts on how they might be resolved. I confess to be perplexed by the persistence of these imbalances, as someone who was concerned about their potentially destabilizing impact a few year ago. But then again I called the stock market bubble back in 1997. Events have a way of […]
Read moreToday’s report from the Fraser Institute finds that, surprise surprise, health care spending is unsustainable. Or at least that is what the Fraser’s funders want you to think. I find the Fraser Institute has an excellent knack for putting out media-friendly goodies that on closer examination do not stand up to scrutiny. But the media are generally not that interested […]
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 moreThe Toronto Star’s Thomas Walkom looks at the choices we make that keep the poor, um, poor. Walkom looks only at the working poor, not the welfare poor. If we add to the pile the numerous regressive reforms to provincial welfare programs the picture is even uglier. There’s much we can do to combat poverty Enforcing current laws would help […]
Read moreThe Economist (September 21 Print Edition) runs an article “The Limits of Solidarity” which attacks US Democrats for favouring union-friendly legislation. It concludes as follows: “After all, trade unions have obvious drawbacks as well as modest attractions. Whenever they win their members higher wage rises than in non-unionised firms, this money has to come from somewhere. If it comes from […]
Read moreFile this one under the economic costs of climate change. If you have been to or flown over BC lately you will have noticed the astonishing amount of red (dying) pine trees. The mountian pine beetle is normally killed by cold cold winters, but winters now are not cold enough, and summers are just to their liking. Add to the […]
Read moreHaving read the electoral tea leaves, Stephen Harper decides to take the “fiscal imbalance” issue off the table, to be replaced, it would appear with the new “green plan”, an issue unmentioned in the Tory platform, but one that they apparently think will get them better milage than the minefield of federal-provincial relations. When Harper first embraced this issue it […]
Read moreWhile I admire Green Party leader Elizabeth May as a committed environmentalist, I have a big problem with her pushing “tax shifting”, which goes by the slogans “tax the bad things like pollution not the good things like employment and work” and “getting the market prices right”. This makes for a great political campaign but one that promises more than […]
Read moreI watched an interesting show on climate change last night. This one was hosted by Avi Lewis as part of The Big Picture series on Newsworld. He had an audience of viewers watch a video by David Attenborough about the challenge of climate change and solutions, then had the last hour for a “town hall” debate that featured interesting folks […]
Read moreWinners or Losers? Liberalizing Public Services Edited by Ellen Rosskam International Labour Office, Geneva 2006 New state of the art review, available upon request by emailing your name/address to: secsoc@ilo.org. Approx. 400 pages. Free of Charge. Available from ILO Geneva Public services are being liberalized world wide, opened to foreign service providers, often turned into private services through privatization, commercialization, […]
Read moreYesterday’s release of the Fiscal Reference Tables also provides data at the provincial level. I reckon that the latest federal surplus of $13.2 billion might start some new cries of “fiscal imbalance” among the provinces in the lead-up to some federal-provincial negotiations this Fall (apart from a wide-ranging discussion paper released at budget time, we still have no real idea […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2006286.pdf This study, “Pension Coverage and Retirement Savings of Canadian Families, 1986 to 2003”, released by StatsCan today, highlights increased inequality of retirement savings at the family level. Unsurprisingly given increased inequality of both earnings and wealth, the top quintile of families are accumulating more retirement savings than was the case in the mid 1980s, while those at the bottom […]
Read moreFor as long as I can remember, the Canadian government has been obsessed with “competitiveness.” It is part of the lexicon of government-speak, despite the fact that unlike productivity there is no established measure of “competitiveness”. So the term is more of a values statement than anything else. To address this shortcoming, the World Economic Forum created an index of […]
Read moreProgressive economists should be disturbed about the cut to Statistics Canada’s Budget announced yesterday by Ministers Flaherty and Baird. The agency has to realize “operational efficiencies” amounting to $15 Million over two years – which may mean cancellation of one or two major surveys, or cuts to staff undertaking research and analysis. Despite the recent glitch in the CPI, StatsCan […]
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