The 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 moreAs the budget yak-fest approaches, the focus is on how we’re going to balance the books. People pointing out we have bigger fish to fry – like making a dent in the nation’s $125 billion infrastructure deficit, addressing growing poverty, or preparing for a massive wave of retirements – are viewed as off-topic. But simply balancing the books is what’s […]
Read moreIf you want to be reminded of the myriad of ways in which markets fail, you will welcome the new and timely book by John Cassidy titled simply How Markets Fail. Cassidy is not only an economist but a rare one who can write. Indeed, he writes so well that he is a regular contributor to the writerly The New […]
Read moreThere are some really wonderful new young economists out of Canada. I just had to let folks know of a fabulous study “Coups, Corporations and Classified Informationâ€(find it via this list) done by one of them: Suresh Naidu (one of our own) and his colleagues Arindrajit Dube and Ethan Kaplan. (In the interest of full disclosure, Suresh is a buddy […]
Read moreThe Canadian Bankers’ Association must be happy. They’ve somehow managed to convince pundits south of the border, and even a few here who really ought to know better, that they’ve somehow been able to weather the economic and financial storm with absolutely no help from the federal government. The most recent evidence for this position is this editorial by Newsweek […]
Read moreHigher oil and natural gas prices are here to stay and that may be a good thing in terms of helping us move to a more energy-efficient economy and averting catastrophic climate change. But we need a plan to safeguard jobs and the living standards of working families in the transition. Rather than leave it all to the market, we […]
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