Benjamin Tal over at CIBC thinks there is good news to be found in the fact that the average duration of unemployment is not rising much despite the fact that unemployment is rising rapidly. As reported in a green shoots kind of good news story by the Globe and Mail In dramatic contrast to past recessions and the current situation […]
Read moreHere is a guest post from BC union (Steelworker) researcher Kim Pollock. By Kim Pollock There is growing evidence that a new stock-market bubble is growing daily, right before our very eyes. But while stock-market prices and market capitalization grow, there are still few signs of real economic recovery. In Canada for instance, real gross domestic product decreased 0.5 percent in […]
Read moreToday’s job numbers are a clear sign that, far from entering a recovery, the Canadian economy is still in free-fall. This was the first month of the third quarter, the quarter in which the Bank of Canada expects positive GDP growth to resume . But, over the past two months, the number of employees has fallen by 124,000 or one […]
Read moreIt is a bit stunning to discover that Jack Mintz – former head of the CD Howe Institute and now at the University of Calgary – has been appointed research director of the federal – provincial review of pensions. http://www.vancouversun.com/business/fp/Jack+Mintz+research+director+pension+reform+task+force/1794203/story.html Even Finance Minister Flaherty should be a bit embarassed to appoint as a “researcher” someone who is so strongly on […]
Read moreI note from a CP wire story that Ottawa U economist David Gray is weighing in behind Harper’s argument that lowering eligibility for EI would be a “disaster”, and I suspect strongly he will not be the last to do so.    http://thechronicleherald.ca/Canada/1135526.html The received wisdom among mainstream neo liberal economists is that a “generous” EI program creates disincentives to […]
Read moreLetter to the Queen: Why No One Predicted the Crisis Her Majesty The Queen Buckingham Palace London SW1A 1AA 29 July 2009 MADAM, In response to your question why no one predicted the crisis you have recently received a letter from Professors Tim Besley and Peter Hennessy, sent on behalf of the British Academy. They claim economists’ failure to foresee […]
Read moreHere’s the link to the second issue of the CLC publication “Recession Watch” detailing recent labour market developments http://canadianlabour.ca/sites/clc/files/Recession-Watch-02-EN.pdf
Read moreI normally hesitate to make short term economic prognostications and the Bank of Canada could indeed be right that growth might tip over the cusp from negative to positive in the third quarter as the first sign of a “nascent recovery” from the Great Recession. As many have noted, including Jim on the National on Thursday night, a mildly positive […]
Read moreThe Spring, 2009 issue of the Oxford Review of Economic Policy contains a useful and interesting piece which convincingly rebuts the often cited and assumed link between Unemployment Insurance “generosity” and higher unemployment due to alleged disincentives to work. You’ll have to pay for the full article, I’m afraid, but here is the abstract. Unemployment compensation and high European unemployment: […]
Read moreThe Economist has recently launched a major attack on public sector pensions, joining the likes of the CFIB and the Howe in Canada who similarly draw invidious contrasts between suuposedly gold-plated public sector pensions and those on offer in the private sector. http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=987105&story_id=13988606 It is true that in Canada, as elsewhere, defined benefit pension plans (which pay out a defined […]
Read moreMy friend and former union (AFL-CIO) economist colleague Tom Palley has produced a characteristically lucid piece on the macro economic roots of the US and global crisis for the New America Foundation. He interprets our predicament as a crisis of the neo liberal growth model and not as a failure of financial regulation or, for that matter, conventional macro economic […]
Read moreBelieve it or not, in 2011, the “new” EI Fund will begin life $10.5 Billion in the hole, setting the stage for a big job-destroying hike in premiums, even though there is a $57 Billion surplus in the “old” EI Account. In the 2009 Budget (p 106) , the federal government announced that it would freeze the EI premium rate […]
Read more(This covers some familiar ground, but I was asked to summarize a presentation I made to a Columbia Institute organized session for progressive locally elected officials last week and thought it might be of wider interest.) The world and Canada are in the deepest economic downturn since the 1930s as the financial crisis has spread with a vengeance into the […]
Read moreThe conventional wisdom seems to be that the financial situation of Canadian households is generally sound and certainly much better than that of our profligate and heavily indebted American neighbours. The Bank of Canada argued in its end of 2008 Financial System Review that “(O)verall, despite a modest deterioration, the financial position of the Canadian household sector remains relatively positive.” […]
Read moreOne question that has long been of concern to me – and for which relevant data are very limited – is the permanency of recent manufacturing job losses. We know that tesn of thousands of jobs have been lost, but not how many job losses are due to the permanent closure of facilities. A paper by Patrice Jalette and Natacha […]
Read moreHere’s an extremely well-written and cogent commentary on the state of the banking system and the grim consequences for the rest of us, especially in the UK, by novelist John Lanchester, from the London Review of Books. He’s at work on a book on the same topic http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/lanc01_.html
Read moreMy personal theory as to why the Canadian banking system survived the great global financial crisis relatively unscathed is that calls by the big Canadian banks in the late 1990s to allow mergers were successfully resisted. Had the big banks been allowed to merge to pursue their global ambitions, they would have ramped up their US and high risk foreign […]
Read moreThere was a problem before the recession in terms of EI claimants exhausting their benefits before finding a new job, and it will soon get much worse. In 2006-07, before the recession, the national unemployment rate averaged just over 6%. Nonetheless, there were over 1.3 million new regular EI claims filed over the year, reflecting the fact that many Canadian […]
Read moreIf the federal deficit for 2009-10 soars by more than $16 Billion from $34 Billion to over $50 Billion, it won’t be mainly because of a jump in EI expenditures as Finance Minister Flaherty seems to have suggested. True, the 2009 Budget EI projections now look badly wrong. The forecast increase in total EI spending from 2008-09 to 2009-10 was […]
Read moreA thoughtful op ed from today’s Ottawa Citizen by Peter Victor, the author of “Managing Without Growth” (Edward Elgar)Â on the case for a no growth future. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/fp/Bigger+better/1590471/story.html Here’s an extract: “Although no 21st-century Keynes has emerged to prepare the intellectual ground for such a change in thinking, we do have a body of knowledge built up over many decades […]
Read moreErin has already posted a comment on last month’s surge in self employment . http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2009/05/08/do-it-yourself-recovery/ My colleague Sylvain Schetagne extracted some data from the Labour Force micro data file to get a better handle on the change last month – note these are NOT seasonally adjusted data so they should be interpreted with a bit of caution. The not seasonally […]
Read moreThe new EI Monitoring and Assessment Report provides some useful information about access before the crisis. http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/employment/ei/reports/eimar_2008/index.shtml In 2007, about one in five (17.7%) of EI premium payers who were laid-off did not qualify for access to EI due specifically to a lack of enough hours of insured work, including 66% of (mainly women) part-time workers and 54% of young […]
Read moreThe 2008 Employment Insurance Monitoring and Assessment Report provides some useful information on the state of active labour market policy in Canada before the recession, much more, in fact, than in previous reports. http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/eng/employment/ei/reports/eimar_2008/index.shtml EI Part II Funds are transferred to the provinces through Labour Market Development Agreements (or LMDAs) which are used (almost entirely) to provide employment benefits (programs) […]
Read moreHaving been chastised for giving what I thought was faint praise to Iggy for moving on EI a couple of days ago , I’m going to really, really stick my head out here and wonder if Alan Greenspan has a point when it comes to potential positive linkages between the stock market and the real economy. http://blogs.ft.com/capitalismblog/2009/03/30/equities-show-us-the-way-to-recovery/ I think that […]
Read moreAt long last, people are starting to get it. As recognized by the Globe and Mail in an editorial today (May 4) and by the TD Bank inthe study put out last Friday, our current EI system is leaving far too many unemployed Canadians out in the cold. Only four in ten unemployed workers currently even qualify for income support from […]
Read moreTD Economics have provided a useful study on possible reforms to our inadequate EI system which has left tens of thousands of unemployed workers out in the cold, and indaequate benefits to those who do qualify. http://www.td.com/economics/special/gb0409_EI.pdf The focus of this report is on those excluded from the system by the variable entrance requirement or VER – the unemployment rate […]
Read moreI’m posting below an interesting missive from Peter Bakvis, the Washington representative of the International Trade Union Confederation, on an intersting shift of position on labour rights by the IFI.s “The World Bank has issued a memorandum to its country and sector directors instructing them to stop using the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) of its highest-circulation publication, “Doing Business” (DB). […]
Read moreWe may all be Keynesians now in terms of the public discourse,  but governments are mainly posturing rather than delivering. That strikes me as a fair summary of a technical and rather dismal discussion of fiscal stimulus packages by the OECD (Chapter 3 of the Interim Economic Outlook relased just before the London G20 Summit.) http://www.oecd.org/document/59/0,3343,en_2649_33733_42234619_1_1_1_1,00.html The OECD calculate that […]
Read moreStatistics Canada provides an “R8” unemployment rate which adds to the unemployed: – discouraged job searchers who have dropped out of the labour force – those working part -time due to unavailability of hours – those not looking for work because awaiting a return to work By this measure, the unemployment rate jumped from 11.7% to 12.4% last month — […]
Read moreHere’s the quick analysis from my colleague Sylvain Schetagne. “61,300 jobs were lost in Canada in March. In fact, 79,500 full-time jobs were lost but some part-time jobs were added last month. The number of full-time jobs lost since October 2008: 386,500. Canadian workers who have lost their jobs since October 2008: 356,500. The unemployment rate has risen to 8.0% […]
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