I’ve pasted in below a letter to Ministers Bernier and Flaherty re the just-announced review of the Foreign Investment Act and foreign take-overs of large Canadian corporations. Links to the two research studies cited in the letter showing that foreign ownership of large internationally-oriented corporations does matter in terms of impacts on the Canadian economy can be found at the […]
Read morehttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070711.wcomment0712/BNStory/Front/home Asks Michael Mendelson from Caledon
Read moreThe OECD have released a modestly interesting, highly empirical report on the changing nature of the manufacturing sector in advanced industrial economies. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/44/17/37607831.pdf It speaks, somewhat tangentially, to the issue of whether “deindustrialization” should be of concern to policy-makers. As is well-known, the declining share of manufacturing employment has been pervasive across OECD countries since 1970… though the study finds […]
Read moreFurther to my and David Green’s posts on the strange economics of temporary foreign workers .. http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/02/08/the-strange-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/ http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/06/28/the-economics-of-temporary-foreign-workers/Â it is strking to observe that such workers are NOT overwhelmingly concentrated in the Western provinces with well below average unemployment rates. In fact, data presented to an Alberta consultation on the program by the Alberta Federation of Labour show that almost […]
Read morehttp://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/sweden_unemployment_2007_06.pdf Right-wingers have countered social democratic citation of the Swedish model as a success by claiming that Sweden has high but hidden unemployment – a claim that recently helped defeat the Swedish social democrats. True, active labour market policies do provide a fair bit of government subsidized employment in Sweden, but, on the other hand there is a lot of […]
Read moreOne of the key contradictions of neo liberalism is between the ideology of free markets and limited government, and the reality that transnationals can and do seek to enhance their competitive position in the global order by presenting themselves to ‘their’ home states as champions of national economic development. This contradiction has been relatively subdued in Canada given the supine […]
Read moreToday’s Globe and Mail (Report on Business, p. B4) reports that when (technically, if) BCE Inc goes private as a result of the sale to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan led group, interest-bearing debt will likely rise from $12 Billion to some $38 Billion, according to Chris Diceman of the Dominion Bond Rating Service. That would more than triple BCE’s […]
Read moreThe Bank of Canada goes to great pains to tell us that they have only one goal – namely to keep inflation at the mid point of the 1-3% target range – and have no view on the appropriate exchange rate of the Canadian dollar except insofar as it relates to this one goal. This stance is more than […]
Read morehttp://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=6c433a24-f12a-4584-9706-9f123ded8234 A good piece from today’s Ottawa Citizen. I’ve been similarly struck by the concern re foreign state involvement in our resource sector, combined with evident lack of concern about loss of domestic control of resource development. Whether we would get that from greater Canadian capitalist ownership of resource companies as opposed to more public owneship and regulation is a […]
Read morehttp://www.ituc-csi.org/spip.php?article1231 Brussels, 21 June 2007: Launching a new report “Where the house always wins, Private Equity, Hedge Funds and the new Casino Capitalism†the world’s peak trade union body, the 168 million-member International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), today issued a global warning to pension funds over investment in private equity and hedge funds. At its biannual General Council meeting, top […]
Read moreElizabeth May and the Green Party can take credit for putting forward a serious climate change plan, based on a $50 per tonne carbon tax, with some revenues from this directed to a reduction of other taxes. http://www.greenparty.ca/en/releases/06.06.2007?origin=redirect Today, they placed in the public realm a study by Marc Jaccard suggesting minimal economic disruption from such a strategy- which I […]
Read moreThe 2007 OECD Employment Outlook incorporates a study (Chapter 3) finding that higher minimum wages raise productivity. In fact, a sophisticated quantitiative study finds that an increase of 10 percentage points in the ratio of the minimum wage to the median hourly wage raises the level of labour productivity in the long-run by between 1.7 and 2.0 percentage points. One possible explanatation cited […]
Read moreThe annual OECD Employment Outlook – the product of the Directorate for Employment. Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) can usually be relied upon to provide a well-reasoned counter point to the extreme neo liberalism of the Economics Directorate (ECO) — and the 2007 issue is no exception.) For a summary and details on how to access the report (full document […]
Read moreThe Globe and Mail ran an editorial last Friday (now subscriber only content)Â Their summary reads:Â “We have grown used to the notion that our governments can run up budget surpluses. If only they could show some vision for putting the money to work.Statistics Canada reported yesterday that all levels of Canadian government posted a combined surplus of $29-billion […]
Read morehttp://www1.hamiltonproject.org/views/papers/furman/200706summers_bordoff.htm At the Canadian Economics Association, I presented a paper (to be published by the CCPA Inequality Project this Fall) on the case for more progressive taxation of income. In a nutshell, my argument was that the tax side of the tax/transfer system must be relied on more to counter growing income inequality, since only the tax side can close […]
Read morehttp://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2100771,00.html Interesting piece on the fortunes being made at Blackstone as the private equity kings take themselves public. CEO Schwarzman made $398 Million last year, and will trouser $449 Million when they go public on top of his continued stake in the business, valued at a staggering $7,700 Million.
Read morehttp://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/ebrief_46.pdf
Read moreBUSINESS WEEK, JUNE 18, 2007 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_25/b4039001.htm COVER STORY By Michael Mandel The Real Cost Of Offshoring U.S. data show that moving jobs overseas hasn’t hurt the economy. Here’s why those stats are wrong Whenever critics of globalization complain about the loss of American jobs to low-cost countries such as China and India, supporters point to the powerful performance of the […]
Read moreWhat follows is a revised and extended version of the comments I made at a panel on the Canadian economy organized by the Bank of Canada and the IMF at the recent Canadian Economics Association meetings. An Update on Canada’s Two Economies – Implications for Workers and for Monetary Policy Andrew Jackson Chief Economist Canadian Labour Congress The Hidden Jobs […]
Read moreToday’s labour force survey shows an alarming deterioration in job quality and gives the lie to the idea that Canada has a very tight job market just because we have a low unemployment rate. In May, we lost 58,000 paid jobs in the private sector, offset by a big jump in self-employment (up by 56,000.) Fully two-thirds (69%) of the […]
Read moreThe National Energy Board is holding hearings into the proposal to ship Alberta tar sands bitumen to the US for further refining – something of a reductio ad absurdum in terms of resource-led development. Fred Wilson from CEP is writing a daily blog from the hearings where his union, the Parkland Institute and other Alberta progressives are intervenors. If you […]
Read moreBusiness Week (May 28 issue) documents how US big oil is ploughing the windfall gains from high prices into share buy backs rather than new production. Exxon Mobil – the world’s most profitable company – pumped out $49 Billion in operating cash flow last year, just 40% went into new capital expenditures, down from 50% in 2000. The other 60% […]
Read moreFrom my morning e mail – bold added. <<Picture (Metafile)>> Le français suit On behalf of Chummer Farina, Director General, Policy and Sector Services Branch, Industry Canada Dear Sir or Madam: I am pleased to invite you to the Global Value Chains Conference to be hosted by Industry Canada on September 25-26, 2007. This by-invitation Conference is expected to involve […]
Read moreMay 29, 2007 OTTAWA – The leaders of Canada’s most important unions and of all the provincial and territorial federations of labour, meeting in Ottawa today as the Executive Council of the Canadian Labour Congress, adopted and issued the following statement: “The soaring Canadian dollar is one of the major factors behind the loss of 250,000 reasonably well-paid manufacturing jobs […]
Read moreI spent the better part of this morning sifting through the latest release of Statcan’s Employment, Earnings and Hours release to get a bit of a fix on what’s happening to all of those displaced manufacturing workers. We in the labour movement tend to see a big shift from reasonably good manufacturing jobs to bad private service jobs – which […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/index.php/Our_Economy__The_rea Here’s the link to a popular pamphlet produced by the CLC for a series of community forums leading up to a national event at the end of the month,
Read moreFurther to my earlier post re Margaret Wente on Inequality http://progecon.wordpress.com/2007/05/15/margaret-wente-and-inequality/ the Ottawa Citizen ran two letters today, from Armine Yalnizyan and myself, responding to Bill Watson’s similar view that we can’t do anything about inequality since it is driven by personal marital choices. The Ottawa Citizen Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Re: Why we need more Pretty […]
Read moreHere’s a communique (posted about 9 pm) from Peter Bakvis of the Global Unions office in Washington who has been closely observing this fiasco. One wonders if Canada is caving along with the Bushies or will stand as the last defenders of this nepotistic ultra neo con.., (And you read it here first — was it a coincidence that Paul […]
Read moreI highly recommend a new StatsCan (Andrew Heisz) study of income inequality and redistribution – with one significant quibble. Heisz confirms a great deal of what we know – family after tax income inequality has been growing apace in the 1990s, driven above all by increased inequality of market income. http://www.statcan.ca/english/research/11F0019MIE/11F0019MIE2007298.pdf This is a methodologically sophisticated study. It confirms the […]
Read moreLAUREL ROTHMAN AND ARMINE YALNIZYAN Special to Globe and Mail Update May 8, 2007 at 12:37 AM EDT Canada‘s child and family poverty rate is down to 11.7 per cent in the latest Statistics Canada report, released last week. So why aren’t anti-poverty activists breaking out the bubbly? Because that rate is exactly what it was in 1989, when parliamentarians […]
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