I was correctly chided for my earlier post on the connection between inequality and happiness, and thanks for the comments. My thinking was also clarified by hearing Wilkinson deliver a fabulous lecture to the Ottawa Economics Association this week. Wilkinson and Pickett’s central argument is that the connection between income inequality and a wide range of measures of well-being – […]
Read moreMartin Khor, of the South Centre, has done an interesting analysis for the (doomed) Cancun negotiations on climate change. The talks have broken down on north-south lines, with southern countries wanting to keep the Kyoto framework that puts the onus on northern (advanced, industrialized) countries to reduce emissions and give carbon space to southern countries carbon to develop their economies. […]
Read moreHere is the link to the fourth isssue of the CLCÂ bulletin on the impacts of the Great Recession on the job market – this looks at the differing fortunes of younger and older workers; the changing composition of the unemployed; and the erosion of EI.
Read moreAs we witness the on-going drama of governments and conservative forces around the world trying to shut down the whistleblower site Wikileaks and imprison and silence its founder, Julian Assange, on very thin grounds of sexual assault (read the British newspaper The Daily Mail’s story on the Swedish police report on the allegations – they are beyond absurd), what we […]
Read moreIn the current battle against an all-out conflagration in Euroland, markets are twitchy about European (and other) banks in the event that the firefighters don’t get ahead of the blaze. If markets lose confidence in those large banks exposed to the problems in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter), the next chapter in the financial crisis will be a […]
Read moreFor many years now, the year 2010 had an almost mythic quality to it. More than just a decade-ending round number (we never collectively named that decade; I like “the naughties” myself), it had deep meaning for BC because THEY WERE COMING. The Olympics. Vancouver 2010. In the early days, utopian olympianism ruled the province. For some, hosting the games […]
Read moreFriday’s labour force survey numbers from Statistics Canada were another nail in the coffin of Canada’s fleeting, fragile economic “recovery.” On first glance, the data seemed to tell a good story: the official unemployment rate tumbled from 7.9% to 7.6% in November. Immediately, that seemed strange — given that 0nly 15,000 jobs were created for the month. Worse yet, full-time […]
Read moreLast month, I blogged about a major new report on the living conditions of Quebec undergraduate students.  The report’s findings include the fact that 50% of full-time undergraduate students in Quebec report living on less $12,200 per year. On the heels of that report’s release comes the news that the Conference of Rectors and Principals of Quebec Universities (CREPUQ), which lobbies on behalf […]
Read morePerhaps the contradiction is more apparent than real. If so please set me straight. The inequality folks like Wilkinson and Pickett argue – convincingly, to my mind  – that those at the top of the income spectrum do hugely better on a wide range of objective well being indicators (eg longevity) than those at the middle and bottom. But the […]
Read moreI’d get popcorn to watch ECB vs. the speculators, if the whole sorry story weren’t so sickening. The European Central Bank is meeting today to figure out what the bleep to do about this mess in Europe (the press conference is happening as I write). In the lead-up to the ECB announcement, non-core bonds (like Spain’s) were doing well in […]
Read moreThis is well worh a read http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/12/01/barry-eichengreen-on-the-irish-bailout/#more-8831
Read moreMany blog readers will remember that when Dalton McGuinty became premier of Ontario in 2003 he vowed to be the “education premier.” Yet, university students in Ontario–at both the undergraduate and graduate level–now pay the highest tuition fees in Canada. Ontario is also in last place nationally in terms of per-student funding for post-secondary education, and has the lowest professor-to-student […]
Read moreHere is a keeper – an IMF study that argues that loss of working class bargaining power is an underlying cause of financial crises, and that retoration thereof is key to reducing debt. The abstract – “The paper studies how high leverage and crises can arise as a result of changes in the income distribution. Empirically, the periods 1920-1929 and […]
Read moreMemo to Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert: Royalties are not taxes Already “under attack for allegedly being rude and dismissive when he was health minister,â€[1] current Energy Minister Ron Liepert conceded he hadn’t read the Parkland Institute’s new report on vast oilpatch profits but that didn’t stop him from dismissing it: “This is a not unexpected sort of NDP/socialist view […]
Read moreThe Parkland Institute released its latest report yesterday morning, detailing the huge scale of oilpatch profits – Misplaced Generosity: Extraordinary profits in Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Many of the responses from government and industry were predictable – that’s why they were addressed in the report. Let’s run through the standard excuses offered for the string of royalty cuts Albertans […]
Read moreFurther to Marc’s post on alternatives to extreme fiscal austerity available to hard hit countries like Ireland and Greece, it is manifestly unfair to attack the living standards of Irish workers to resolve a crisis that was not of their making, especially given that most of the fruits of the the debt financed housing boom probably went to others. The […]
Read moreWhat are banks for? Typically, banks are described as intermediaries that take deposits and lend them out, earning what is called net interest margin on the gap between what is paid on the savings and what is earned on loans. From where I stand, this description is wrong on three counts. First, it suggests that banks need deposits to make […]
Read moreIn a carefully timed intervention coming shortly before Finance Ministers meet to discuss retirement income reform, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business today released an econometric study by Peter Dungan of the University of Toronto on the economic impacts of the CLC proposal to double the Canada Pension Plan replacement rate, The CFIB regards CPP premiums as job-killing payroll taxes. […]
Read moreThe front page of today’s Globe and Mail reports the latest chapter in the federal attempt to create a national securities regulator. (Premiers push back against national securities regulator plan).  Part of the Harper government’s response to the financial crisis was to promise to remedy the patchwork of provincial securities regulators. If securities regulators are going to avert future […]
Read moreBack in May when Greece was in the process of getting its “bailout” I kept wondering why it had to be that Greece would accept such harsh conditions when it held an ace up its sleeve. The proposed package of austerity, which would make the economy worse, was only an issue as long as Greece felt it needed to stay […]
Read moreI was talking about carbon pricing and BC’s carbon tax recently and Michael Byers asked me about the prospects for a progressive carbon tax in terms of its rate structure. My first answer was that I liked the idea but was not sure how that could work in practice; that is, tax carbon and deal with inequality through the income […]
Read moreToday’s Globe and Mail features an article about the farming crisis in Canada. On close inspection the “crisis” is that Canada has not kept up its share of the global marketplace; that is, it is about our failure to increase exports. Low farm incomes are mentioned with nostalgiac dismay but nothing of the large transnational companies that dominate seeds and […]
Read moreSylvain Schetagne and I have been looking at key changes in the job market over the past two years of recession and partial recovery using the Labour Force Survey data for October 2008 and October 2010. The full analysis will be in the next issue of the CLC’s “Recession Watch.†There have been some rather striking developments among both younger […]
Read moreTo provide a little context for our current national debate on foreign investment, I did a little digging recently in the FDI data. Some of my findings surprised me. Yes, Canada exports slightly more FDI capital than we import (that is, the net investment position in FDI is slightly positive). But most of what we export is in banking; most […]
Read moreGM’s $22 billion IPO got off to a roaring start last week. It’s ironic, needless to say, that it was underwritten by some of the same financiers (JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, and Bank of America) who brought us the global financial crisis — the same crisis that pushed GM over the edge into bankruptcy protection! That just goes to […]
Read moreResults of a major survey of post-secondary students were released on Thursday. The 149-page report, entitled Sources et Modes de Financement des Etudiants the Premier Cycle 2009, was written by the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ). It was done in collaboration with Léger Marketing, who suveyed almost 13,000 undergraduate students in Quebec, spanning 14 different post-secondary institutions in the province. According […]
Read moreAn open letter to the world at large: “Bank shareholders rejoice. Pension funds rebound. Hark, the Globe and Mail comes bearing good news my brothers and sisters.  Yes, the drums beat steady. The heart skips irregularly. The palms sweat profusely. Because soon, soon, the big banks will engage in our society’s number one passtime. Well yes, of course, I speak […]
Read moreThe full reports of the CLC Communities in Crisis project are now available (links are at the end of each community summary.) Canada lost almost 500,000 full-time jobs between the Fall of 2008 and the Summer of 2009, with a particularly devastating impact upon industrial communities where a wave of layoffs and plant closures added to the toll of the longer […]
Read moreCan socialism be revived? Does it have a chance to gain some traction ever again? Unfortunately, the two great experiments in socialism attempted during the last century – social democracy and the Stalinist model of state-controlled socialism – are now spent forces. In respect to sweeping capitalism into the dustbin of history, they both failed. And socialism as an ideological, […]
Read moreThe International Energy Agency released its World Energy Outlook the other day, and made some headlines by calling 2006 the year of peak oil production. People have different perspectives on the topic of peak oil – many see it as the point upon which civilization as we know it will collapse; with my climate change hat on, I’ve generally thought […]
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