The Progressive Economics Forum

Concordia’s “Culture of Contempt”

August 14, 2011 Nick Falvo 4 comments

In June of this year, a report was released on governance at Concordia University.Â Entitled Strengthening Governance at Concordia: AÂ Collective Challenge, the report can be accessed here: www.concordia.ca/vpirsg/documents/EGRC-REPORT.pdf. The 39-page report was written by the External Governance Review Committee, a three-person committee chaired by none other than Bernard J. Shapiro (Canada’s first Ethics Commissioner). The report paints a picture of a […]

Auto Labour Costs and Auto Industry Recovery

August 12, 2011 Jim Stanford 5 comments

I was recently invited to speak to the annual management briefing conference sponsored in Michigan by the Center for Automotive Research, a fine outfit which does the best research work in the continent on auto employment, workers, and skills.Â My slides are available here. My panel was addressing the current UAW negotiations with the Detroit Three automakers â€“ the first […]

Market Mayhem

August 12, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

The wild swings in the North American financial markets this week serve as yet another reminder of the weakness ofÂ anyÂ linkage between levels and changes in financial asset values and levels and changes in real economic variables. This is apparent for both bonds and equities. In the case of the US and Canada, the rise in government bond prices is […]

MMT: What it Means for Canada

August 12, 2011 Keith Newman 16 comments

Arun Duboisâ€™ blog post yesterday on Modern Monetary Theory has prompted me to write my own take on the subject.Â For those interested, an interesting thumbnail sketch of MMT, essentially functional finance augmented by a full understanding of monetary operations, is explained here. While MMT deals with the details of monetary and fiscal matters, the implications of its analysis are […]

No Retreat, No Surrender: Time For Progressives to Explode Deficit/Monetary Myths

August 11, 2011 Arun DuBois 28 comments

Friends, I’m concerned. I fear that too often, we on the left retreat when we should attack, surrender when we should vanquish.Â What do I speak of?Â Well, I am concerned that too many of us are willing to play in the frame, the box, the straighjacket of modern discourse about fiscal and monetary policy.Â Obama does it.Â The NDP […]

Thoughts on “Why not print money?”

August 10, 2011 Marc Lee 10 comments

Richard Gilbert’s “Why not print money?” in the Globe’s Economy Lab toys with more radical monetary intervention as a response to the crisis. Desperate times, they say, call for desperate measures. The title (which was perhaps not Gilbert’s at all) is more provocative than the article itself, which is mostly about tolerating higher inflation that could have beneficial impacts for […]

Japanizing the World Economy

August 10, 2011 Erin Weir 8 comments

This guest post is from PEF members Marc Lavoie and Mario Seccareccia, both of whom are full professors of economics at the University of Ottawa. The â€œJapanizationâ€ of the World Economy Over the last twenty years, the Japanese economy underwent a long period of economic stagnation that some economists have characterized as a protracted â€œbalance-sheet recessionâ€. The period has been […]

Stimulus vs Public Investment

August 10, 2011 Andrew Jackson 7 comments

A column by Stiglitz in the Financial Times makes what I think is an important point. The current debate over fiscal policy for the US, Europe and Canada is often characterized in the media as one between advocates ofÂ higher deficits from Keynesian style stimulus measures,Â and advocates of lower deficits through public sector austerity.Â Within this frame, the advocates […]

C. D. Howeâ€™s Overnight Moves Need Work

August 9, 2011 Erin Weir One comment

Less than a month ago, the C. D. Howe Institute released Michael Parkinâ€™s paper, â€œOvernight Moves: The Bank of Canada Should Start to Raise Interest Rates Now.â€ The next day, its Monetary Policy Council called on the Bank to increase the overnight interest rate. This call was terrible. The following week, Statistics Canada reported Juneâ€™s significant drop in inflation â€“ […]

About those “unfunded liabilities”

August 9, 2011 Marc Lee 11 comments

When it comes to the Canada Pension Plan, a major talking point from the right is that the CPP has “unfunded liabilities”, with the implication that is not affordable and financially unsustainable. This is nonsense, a scare tactic based on an accounting fiction that counts only future expenditures but does not count future revenues. For example, John Robson writes in […]

The New Phase of the Crisis

August 8, 2011 Andrew Jackson 7 comments

The Great Recession was followed by an anaemic recovery in the advanced economies, which threatens to be followed by a double dip or worse now that theÂ fiscal stimulus measures of 2009 and 2010 have been succeeded by austerity programs. Now we face a new financial crisis, or at least a stock market correction of major proportions, which may precipitate […]

Social Europe Journal

August 5, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

For those of you out there who have not seen it, I recommend Social Europe Journal.Â There is a lot of good progressive economic commentary by leading European economists and policy types of a social democratic persuasion, as well as frequent commentary from Stiglitz, Reich and other US economists. Some good recent columns and blog posts on the European sovereign […]

More on Public Sector Austerity in Canada

August 5, 2011 Andrew Jackson 2 comments

A short addendum to my previous post: I checked the most recent IMF projections in the June, 2011 Update to the Fiscal Monitor. Table 1 provides estimates of changes in the general government government cyclically adjusted balance in percent of potential GDP. Basically changes are the result of discretionary changes in fiscal policy rather than due to improvement or deterioration […]

Today’s Job Numbers

August 5, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

Analysis from my colleague Sylvain Schetagne: A decreasing unemployment rate is not always a sign of a strong labour market. The decrease in the unemployment rate from 7.4% to 7.2% observed between June and July 2011 is mainly due to Canadians leaving the labour market, not to their finding jobs. In July, the number of unemployed Canadians decreased by 35,700 […]

Canada’s GHG commitment problem

August 4, 2011 Marc Lee One comment

For the past decade, Canada’s GHG emission targets were framed by the Kyoto Protocol, in which Canada committed to a 6% reduction in emissions by 2012 relative to 1990 levels (590 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or Mt CO2e). In spite of signing this treaty and its ratification through Parliament in 2002, Canada has continued to increase emissions. In […]

Tuition Increases by Stealth

August 4, 2011 Nick Falvo 5 comments

On Tuesday night, Peterborough City Council approved a plan for a for-profit corporation to own and operate a new student residence at Trent University.Â I’m concerned that this may signal a new trend at Canadian universities; about a year ago, I blogged about a similar plan at the University of Toronto. I am not opposed to private sector actors being […]

Public Sector Austerity: Why is Canada Leading the Way?

August 3, 2011 Andrew Jackson 23 comments

The major economic problem faced by Canadians is a very slow recovery and weak job market, not government deficits or rising debt. But public spending cuts at the federal and provincial level will make the real problem even worse. And, government spending cuts in Canada seem set to be even greater than in other advanced industrial countries, even though our […]

Clemens vs. Clemens

August 1, 2011 Erin Weir 18 comments

Jason Clemens, who hangs his hat at several right-wing think-tanks (the Fraser, Pacific Research and Macdonald-Laurier Institutes), lauds Canadian fiscal conservatism in todayâ€™s Wall Street Journal: Canadaâ€™s government, for example, has grown smaller over the last 15 years. Total government spending as a share of the economy peaked at a little over 53% in 1993. Through a combination of spending […]

Notes on the social cost of carbon

July 29, 2011 Marc Lee 8 comments

A recent paper by Ackerman and Stanton did some re-estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon, finding this measure of the externality (or costs imposed on third parties) from burning fossil fuels could be as high as $893 per tonne of CO2, rising to $1,500 per tonne by 2050. These are extreme estimates, but they are calculated using a conservative […]

Decarbonizing homes and the price of gas

July 28, 2011 Marc Lee 8 comments

Our climate justice framework for BC is to eliminate fossil fuels by 2040. In the household sector, this poses a significant challenge, not so much in terms of technology and knowledge, but because natural gas is much cheaper than electricity per unit of energy. Even though BC has among the lowest prices in North America, and for relatively clean electricity […]

The Myth of Expansionary Austerity

July 26, 2011 Andrew Jackson 27 comments

As the US and Europe turn from stimulus to fiscal austerity, claims are heard that spending cuts actually stimulate economic growth. That is the argument heard, not just from the Republicans in the US Congress, but also from theÂ Obama Administration who have pretty much stopped listening to even mainstream macro-economists. And it is the argument of European finance ministers and […]

Is Social Assistance a “Poverty Pariah?”

July 24, 2011 Nick Falvo 13 comments

An article in the current edition of NOW Magazine looks at social assistance in Ontario. The article is aptly entitled “Poverty Pariah,” in light of how apparently unpopular Ontario’s welfare system has become over the past 20 years. As can be seen at the National Council of Welfare’s Interactive Welfare Incomes Map, a single adult on welfare in Ontario receives […]

Global University Rankings

July 22, 2011 Nick Falvo 2 comments

The European University Association (EUA) recently released a report they’d commissioned entitled Global University Rankings and Their Impact. The report was written by Andrejs Rauhvargers. According to the EAU,Â one of theirÂ major motivations in commissioning the report was that their member universitiesÂ are “often under pressure to appear in the rankings, or to improve their position in one way or another.” Some […]

How To Fund Innovation

July 22, 2011 Nick Falvo 4 comments

Just over a year ago, I wrote an opinion pieceÂ about the federal government’s “innovation strategy” andÂ its impact onÂ the post-secondary education sector. In the piece,Â I argue that the strategy has resulted in significant funding increases for university R&D.Â But I also argue in the piece that the strategy creates winners and losers–i.e. a “world class” doctoral student might get a $50,000/yr. scholarship, […]

Family Values and Budget Cuts

July 21, 2011 Armine Yalnizyan 5 comments

Once again, in the middle of summer, the anti-government government has unleashed more anti-policy policy via a compliant Statistics Canada. Who needs data when you’ve got family values? The Harper team knows what you need. (Hint: tax cuts. Oops! Not for you sister, if you’re a single mom.) The Globe and Mail’s Tavia Grant has learned that Statistics Canada will […]

Expanding the Canada Pension Plan

July 21, 2011 Andrew Jackson Leave a comment

The case for expanding benefits under the CPP as a needed response to the crisis ofÂ private pensions continues to win expert support – even as the financial industry and small business lobbies continue to fight real pension reform tooth and nail. The centre-right Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) have published interesting and useful papers by MichaelÂ Wolfson – former […]

What is a middle class income these days?

July 20, 2011 Iglika Ivanova 10 comments

Whenever we consider the pros and cons of a new policy, we want to know if it benefits or hurts the poor, the middle class and those who are better off. Often, the answer depends on how we define each of these groups. It’s said that 99% of Canadians think of themselves as middle class, regardless of their income. But […]

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