Inequality, Wages and Debt
Further to my earlier post on how to respond to record household debt, I wrote a longer piece for a wider audience at The Mark. Thanks for the great comments on the post!
Read moreMissing the Vote: Democratic Reform in BC
I’ve long thought that we should lower the voting age to 16, so thanks to Mike deJong for raising it in the BC Liberal leadership campaign. I speak from some experience, as I voted shortly after I turned 17 in the Ontario provincial election. I was a frosh in residence at Western and no one called me on it so […]
Read moreHomelessness in Canada’s North
I’m the main researcher on a three-year SSHRC-funded research project looking at homelessness and affordable housing in the Northwest Territories (NWT). Frances Abele (Carleton University) is Principal Investigator on the project, and Arlene Haché (Yellowknife Women’s Society) is Co-Investigator. The project falls under the larger umbrella of the Social Economy Research Network of Northern Canada. Though several larger papers will come out […]
Read moreGlobal Wage Crisis
The International Labour Organization has just released its second Global Wage Report, “Wage Policies in Times of Crisis.†The International Trade Union Confederation’s press release follows: 15 December 2010 – The ITUC has welcomed the second Global Wage Report from the International Labour Organization (ILO). “Today’s report reinforces what unions around the world have been saying about the economic crisis […]
Read moreWhat to do about Household Debt?
It’s a funny old economy we live in. The release of today’s national balance sheet accounts has aroused great concern about the rise of the ratio of household debt to personal disposable income to a new record of 148%. Mark Carney and our banks want – quite rightly – to discourage further borrowing to prevent a disaster for highly leveraged […]
Read moreA Provincial Scattergram
Further to my earlier post on Happiness and Inequality, here is a scattergram on the relationship between income inequality (measured by the ratio of the top to bottom quintile of after tax family income) and happiness (satisfied and very satisfied with life.) Quite a tight fit. Â
Read moreThe Economic Footprint of a Canadian-Made Car
Like most dailies, the Globe and Mail produces a honking big weekly supplement on cars; theirs is called Globe Drive, and comes out every Friday. One feature of the section is a mildly amusing column called “My Wheels,” each edition of which features some minor Canadian celebrity discussing their personal choice of vehicle. I recently pitched an idea to the […]
Read moreThe Jobs Crisis and the Recovery
The tripartite International Labour Organization (ILO) has released it’s flagship 2010 World of Work Report. It offers a useful partial counterpoint to the economic analysis of other international organizations such as the IMF and the OECD. The ILO argues that the employment rate in advanced countries will not return to pre crisis levels until well after 2015, and perhaps not […]
Read moreIndustry Canada Pans Free Trade?
Shortly before I left Canada, Canadian Business magazine contacted me for a story on productivity. It highlighted a presentation by Industry Canada economist Annette Ryan. I was struck by slide 40 (41 of 44 in the PDF): In an endogenous sunk cost model, opening free trade and intensifying competition leads to a divergence in innovation paths. Firms in the less […]
Read morePoor Capitalists?
Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon argues that capitalists are not rich. Of course, wealth is more or less synonymous with owning things that can be broadly defined as capital. Stephen’s argument is focused on income: “If capital income is concentrated among high earners, then it could still be argued that increasing labour’s share of income will reduce inequality.†[…]
Read moreCanadian Housing Observer 2010
In late-October, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released the Canadian Housing Observer 2010. I’ve finally given it a thorough read and am struck by some of the statistics. The MLS average price of a home in Canada has almost doubled in the past decade. In 2000, the figure was just under $164,000. By 2009, it was just over $320,000. Perhaps not surprisingly, during this same period, residential […]
Read moreHappiness and Inequality Revisited
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 moreRecession Watch
Here 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 moreWikileaks and the Power of Corporatism
As 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 moreLessons from the Eurocrisis: If the fire marshal is saying that you shoulda had a fire detector, it might already be too late.
In 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 moreLabour Market Exodus and Other Unhappy Math
Friday’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 moreBlaming the Victims: Quebec Students
Last 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 moreHappiness vs Inequality
Perhaps 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 moreECB vs. the speculators
I’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 moreEichengreen on Ireland
This is well worh a read http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/12/01/barry-eichengreen-on-the-irish-bailout/#more-8831
Read moreMcGuinty’s Post-Secondary Education Strategy
Many 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 moreWorker Bargaining Power and the Crisis
Here 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 Energy Minister
Memo 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 moreNew report, old excuses
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 moreHow About Capital Levies as an Alternative to Austerity?
Further 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 moreRevenge of the Debt Zombies — or — “What are Banks for Anyway?”
What 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 moreCPP Expansion and Jobs
In 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 moreMight the proposed new federal securities regulator weaken regulatory oversight?
The 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 moreWhat’s new pussycat (Celtic tiger edition)?
Back 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 moreYounger Workers, Older Workers and the Recession
Sylvain 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 […]
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