Gas prices are way up and look to continue that way looking forward. So what does this mean in terms of behavioural change? Todd Litman does a major review of all kinds of transportation elasticities. An excerpt: As it is usually measured, automobile travel is inelastic, meaning that a percentage price change causes a proportionally smaller change in vehicle mileage. […]
Read moreMurray Campbell’s excellent column in today’s Globe and Mail (excerpted below) accurately portrays the current state of play on the interprovincial trade front, including Steven Shrybman’s constitutional challenge of TILMA in Alberta and BC, Saskatchewan’s continued rejection of TILMA, the Quebec-Ontario negotiations and corporate Canada’s unrelenting push for new powers. One can only hope that the Globe editorial board reads […]
Read moreSummer is coming and so is my favourite band, the Drive-By Truckers. A rare Vancouver appearance at a small venue, the Biltmore Caberet, walking distance from my house. Heck, last year I drove to Portland to see what turned out to be one of the best live shows of my life. I would make the case that DBT are currently […]
Read moreA fine editorial from Marjorie Cohen in today’s Vancouver Sun on the close link between labour policies and wage inequality. http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/editorial/story.html?id=4952dab6-b337-42b9-b872-5b338ef3f212&k=85286&p=2
Read moreWell. Finally. Some clarity. Sort of. Earlier this month, Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney made appearances before the House of Commons Finance Committee and the Senate Banking, Trade and Commerce committee to discuss the Bank’s latest monetary policy report . Transcripts are now available and with a little reading-between-the-lines, they tell us a lot, I think, about the true […]
Read moreLast Tuesday’s episode of Politics featured Barb Byers on changes to (Un)Employment Insurance and Michael Ignatieff on the humanitarian crisis in Burma. I naturally agree with Byers, but get nervous whenever Ignatieff starts talking tough about the Responsibility to ProtectTM, the doctrine that he invoked to promote the invasion of Iraq. Ignatieff did not really answer Don Newman’s question about what […]
Read moreJim’s recent mini-study emphasized that profits now occupy gargantuan shares of GDP in the oil-rich provinces. He and The Jurist have noted the total disconnect between corporate profits and personal income in two of those provinces: Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. To explore this issue further, I have pulled some figures out of the recently-released 2007 Provincial and Territorial Economic Accounts (in […]
Read moreAlong with John Edwards, the United Steelwokers union has endorsed Barack Obama for the US Presidency. Those paying attention may recall that, a month ago, the Steelworker President indicated that it would be inappropriate for super (ex-officio) delegates to vote against pledged (elected) delegates in selecting the Democratic nominee. This position rejected Hillary Clinton’s strategy of asking super delegates to […]
Read moreJeffrey Simpson is right to lament that “there is no realistic, sensible debate†about health care in BC. Unfortunately, his May 13th Globe & Mail column “Even the redoubtable Premier Campbell struggles with health care†does not help. Simpson’s main point in the column is that health care spending in BC is rising out of control, defeating Campbell’s efforts to […]
Read moreAn interesting paper: Controversies about the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey by Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Becker. http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~idew/papers/BPEA_final_ineq.pdf Abstract This paper provides a comprehensive survey on six aspects of rising inequality: changes in laborÂfs share, inequality at the bottom, inequality at the top, labor mobility, inequality in consumption as contrasted to inequality of income, and international differences in […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/policy_papers I commend to your attention the policy papers which will be presented for discussion and debate at the CLC Convention, which convenes the week after next in Toronto. Progressive economists Mike McCracken and Armine Yalnizyan will help kick-off discussion on the Good Jobs and Growing Gap papers respectively. Though neither they nor the progressive economics community had a direct […]
Read moreUnionization Substantially Increases the Wages of Low-Wage Workers “While all workers benefit from union membership, low-wage workers see largest gains” For Immediate Release: May 15, 2008 Contact: Alan Barber, (202) 293-5380 x115 WASHINGTON, DC: After decades of disappointing wage growth for many American workers, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) shows that unionization significantly […]
Read moreThe CCPA just published a mini-study by yours truly on how the coming federal corporate income tax cuts will exacerbate regional inequalites in Canada. Here’s the link for the full study: http://www.policyalternatives.ca/Reports/2008/05/PickingWinners/index.cfm?pa=BB736455 Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and his colleagues like to pretend they are “neutral” in their economic policy-making. That is, they don’t “pick winners.” They just create an efficient, […]
Read moreToday’s Toronto Star continues the War on Poverty with a front-page report on an emerging coalition among unions, environmentalists, and social activists.
Read moreOK, not the “law of one price” you learned in undergrad trade theory. I’m talking about plain old prices at the cashier. It has long bugged me that the price listed on a sales tag is not the same as the money that comes out of our wallets to complete the transaction. Most of the time it is provincial and […]
Read moreWith credit to Edward Sussex who sends this summary ” This UNDP-IPC paper concludes that the real per capita income of the vast majority or the first eighty per cent of any nation (vast majority income – VMIpc), is of particular interest in comparing the income levels and income inequality of countries. It finds that average income measures are not […]
Read moreIn policy terms I have been concerned about regressive impacts of a carbon tax, and was pleased to see that BC’s carbon tax is being partly recycled into refundable tax credits for low-income families. But the $10 per tonne carbon tax starting in July is rather small (2.4 cents per litre), and in spite of a tripling of the rate […]
Read moreWhen we think about renewable energy most of us imagine solar panels and wind mills. Few of us think about trees and crops. But these latter items are getting mainstreamed as new sources of energy – burning them for electricity generation and converting them into liquid fuels – with no small amount of controversy attached. The premise of bioenergy in […]
Read morePremier McGuinty and other commentators like to emphasize that federal revenues from Ontario exceed federal spending in Ontario by about $20 billion annually. Although this total partly reflects the overall federal surplus and federal spending outside Canada, it is usually presented as a transfer of expenditure from Ontario to other provinces. A standard story is that, back in the days […]
Read moreThe lead editorial in today’s Toronto Star essentially restates McGuinty’s case more coherently than yesterday’s reports. The supposed problem identified is that, if Ontario becomes a “have-not” province, it would continue to pay more into Equalization than it would get out. This scenario is not nearly as strange as The Star makes out. Equalization has always been funded by all […]
Read moreFor a while, the Ontario Premier was looking quite reasonable in his dispute with the federal government. As Jim Flaherty charged that Ontario’s economic woes reflected a lack of provincial corporate tax cuts, Dalton McGuinty correctly responded that a lower rate of tax on profits would entail a large fiscal cost and provide little assistance to Ontario’s currently unprofitable manufacturing […]
Read moreMy take on today’s Labour Force Survey follows: Rising Unemployment For a third consecutive month, more Canadians entered the labour market than found jobs, pushing the number of unemployed workers above 1.1 million for the first time since November 2006. In April, all of the modest increase in employment was self-employment. One must ask whether Canadians are becoming self-employed voluntarily […]
Read moreMargaret Wente, circa August 2005: The other day I stuck the nozzle in the tank of my dainty little SUV and paid for my first $50 fill. It was a shock, but I knew it was coming, and I know it’s going to get worse. … Theoretically, I know my car dependency is bad (and my SUV dependency is even […]
Read moreToday’s excellent Globe Report on Business story on Potash Corp CEO William Doyle http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080508.wrpotash08/BNStory/energy/home scarcely requires additional commentary. But here goes – Apparently, his stock options are now worth $600 Million, up from $7 Million at the end of 2003. This huge windfall reflects soaring potash prices, up from $100 to $600 per tonne over more or less the same […]
Read more … is homes. Check out this astonishing admission, as reported by CBC: St. Paul’s in downtown Vancouver, one out of every four beds is being used to treat the homeless, drug addicts and the mentally ill, said [Lorna Howes, the director of acute and community mental health for Vancouver with the Vancouver Coastal Health authority]. We are spending money on […]
Read more“Post-secondary education plays an important role in ensuring there are highly trained people to fill the many positions that will be left vacant by the wave of retiring baby boomers,†says BC Minister of Advanced Education Murray Coell in a news release announcing the creation of a new doctoral degree program (in gerontology) at Simon Fraser University. The release ends […]
Read moreIn another interesting presentation on research in progress at the StatsCan conference, David Green and Pierre Brochu report that increases in minimum wages in Canada are associated with significantly longer job tenure for less educated, low job tenure workers – at least for the short-term period following the minimum wage increase. One possible implication is that employers benefit from higher […]
Read moreBrian Murply and Paul Roberts from StatsCan presented an interesting and potentially very useful and important study to this week’s StatsCan Socio-Economic performance. The effective personal income tax rate is typically computed – across various data sources – as total taxes paid as a ratio of total or taxable personal income. This ratio of two overall averages is accurate enough […]
Read moreAlthough it was probably overshadowed by the census release, Ralph Goodale appeared to jump on Marc’s deficit bandwagon last week. Some paragraphs in the early portion of his National Post op-ed seemed like they belonged on this blog: He [Harper] has taken this nation to the brink of a deficit – the first in more than a decade. And it’s […]
Read moreBrowsing through the letters to the editor in the two big Vancouver dailies this morning, I came across a letter from BC Premier Gordon Campbell responding to the recent Census findings of declining median incomes for workers in this province. The letter was published in both newspapers: a longer version under “Purchasing power and globalization” in the Vancouver Sun and […]
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