Overall, there was little change in overall labour market conditions in December. The national unemployment rate was unchanged at 7.6% as a modest total of 22,000 new jobs were created. While the total number of persons working has risen above pre recession levels, the national employment rate (the proportion of the working age population with jobs) is still well below […]
Read moreAndrew Sharpe has published an interesting new study on the marked slowdown in Canadian labour productivity growth from the early 200s. He decomposes the decline in productivity growth into changes at the detailed industry level, and finds that the majority (53%) of the slowdown in productivity growth between 1997-2000 and 2000-2007Â is attributable to changes in manufacturing, with the lion’s […]
Read moreAn interesting intervention in the UK debate over the future of social democracy.
Read moreThe Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) got some uncritical media attention with their “study” of tax increases for 2011. Their release states that: “Increases in EI and CPP payroll tax thresholds mean that anyone earning more than $44,200 will pay an additional $76, while employers pay an additional $110 in 2011 payroll taxes. Increases in payroll taxes are primarily attributable to […]
Read moreJeffrey Simpson seems to favour the sensible option of CPP expansion, but also wants to raise the CPP retirement age. “Curiously, there seems to be an aversion among governments to easing future retirement costs by raising the age of retirement. Australia, France and the United States have already done so, lifting the age for future receipt of public pensions. Other […]
Read moreFlaherty’s proposed new pension vehicle bears a remarkably close resemblance to that put forward by Frank Swedlove of the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association to the IRPP pensions conference. (I guess he wins the prize for most influential presentation. I put the case for CPP expansion, while Bill Robson argued for not doing very much at all.) I gather […]
Read moreHere are the CLC’s Q and As re proposed Pooled Registered Pension Plans. Basically they are like group RRSPs, but sponsored by a financial institution with a fiduciary responsibility as opposed to an employer. They may be somewhat lower cost than individual RRSPs, as with current group RRSPs. However, there will be a lot of such plans, with different investment […]
Read moreFurther 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 moreIt’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 moreFurther 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 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 moreI 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 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 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 moreThis is well worh a read http://www.irisheconomy.ie/index.php/2010/12/01/barry-eichengreen-on-the-irish-bailout/#more-8831
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 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 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 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 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 moreMy thoughts on the Seoul G20 – from the Mark.
Read moreA propos of the launch of the Canada – India trade talks, Bill Robson resorted to the tired old bicycle metaphor on CBCs Power and Politics. He is not alone. This cliche gets voiced all the time. Like a cyclist who will topple if she or he slows down, the momentum of trade liberalization must be maintained, we are told,  or we […]
Read moreWell under one half of Canada’s 1.5 million unemployed workers are collecting EI benefits today, even though the national unemployment rate is still almost 8%. Special EI measures introduced as part of the 2009 Budget, notably an extra 5 weeks of benefits for all claimants, expired this fall, long before a real labour market recovery has taken place. The additional […]
Read moreThe Economist  judges that it is working . Long term interest rates have fallen since Bernanke announced the Fed was going to restart the printing press, usefully making the US government deficit a tad easier to finance. The stock market has been juiced, which may have a wealth effect on aggregate demand. And the US dollar has fallen against currencies that […]
Read morehttp://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/01-tuacG8G20-Seoul_English.pdf Employment has fallen off the agenda with the turn to co-ordinated austerity in the struggling developed economies. What remains to be seen is if they can engineer some kind of coherent program to stop everyone from counting on export led growth via devaluation.
Read moreWho would have thought it. More than twenty years after the Canada-US FTA all but buried the economic nationalist legacy of the Trudeau era, a major foreign take-over seems to have been blocked. That’s twice under the Conservatives, after years of Liberal rubber stamping of foreign acquisitions under the Investment Canada Act. This is certainly worthy of some celebration. I […]
Read moreFollowers of statistical entrails have known for some time that the incidence of poverty (sorry, low income) varies between surveys. The Census – which covers 20% of the population – captures significantly more low income persons than does the annual Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics which is based on a much smaller sample which is followed for a period […]
Read moreTD Economics have released an interesting if rather thin report on the Toronto recovery. I say thin because, while there is not a wealth of current data, we do get labour market data for the huge Toronto Census Metropolitan Area. As they show, there has been a huge loss of manufacturing jobs in the region, offset to a degree by […]
Read moreIn the run up to the Seoul Summit, the issue du jour has become “the currency wars.” I certainly side with those who think that the under-valuation of the Chinese currency and its fix to the US dollar at that low level constitutes a huge subsidy to Chinese exports which has played a major role in the creation of large […]
Read moreThis looks like a good contribution from Dean Baker. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/austerity-myth-2010-10.pdf
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