http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_12/b4026050.htm A rather moving story from Business Week about the real victims of the crisis of the US subprime mortage market – the borrowers. The late stages of the US housing bubble were sustained by a flood of new buyers – lower income households tempted to get into the housing market by superficially low interest rate mortgages for which they […]
Read morehttp://www.ndp.ca/xfer/pdf/2007-03-09-flahertyprebudget_e.pdf A good letter outlining what the federal NDP would like to see in the upcoming federal Budget.
Read morehttp://www.liberal.ca/news_e.aspx?type=speech&id=12324 No big surprises in today’s big speech to a business audience – the usual mainstream Finance/OECD stuff on enhancing competitiveness by building a knowledge based economy. Surprisingly little in the way of an attempt to link industrial and environmental policy, for all of that green rhetoric during the leadership campaign. Ditto re any linkage between social justice and economic […]
Read morehttp://www.epi.org/ A project of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, this involves some 50 economists and policy specialists in the task of developing a new, progressive US economic policy agenda. The link from the EPI web site leads to some good papers by Jeff Faux on trade, and Richard Freeman and others on unions, as well as a recent presentation […]
Read moreThe Globe Report and Business has a story today (can’t find it online) to the effect that the federal Budget will improve depreciation rates for new capital equipment investment, but not lower the general corporate income tax rate beyond already planned levels. As noted by Erin in an earlier post, this reflects Finance thinking as reflected in the recent report […]
Read morehttp://www.canadianlabour.ca/index.php/briefs_to_parliament/1096 The Canadian Labour Congress today submitted to the Parliamentary Committee looking at Bill C-30, the Clean Air Act which deals with greenhouse gas emissions. Our brief sets out a broad labour perspective on climate change issues – focusing on the need for a planned transition to a more environmentally sustainable economy. Labour supports sticking with Kyoto, deeper emissions reduction […]
Read morehttp://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2023410,00.html The current panic on the world’s markets is indicative of more than just the madness of crowds, writes Larry Elliott Wednesday February 28, 2007 Guardian Unlimited Predictably, the crash in global share prices is being shrugged off as a mere blip. The fact that Shanghai fell by 9% in a day and Wall Street had its biggest one-day fall […]
Read moreI just received my 2006 issue of Society at a Glance: OECD Social Indicators. (Best seen in living colour!) The OECD now regularly reports systematic national indicators of earnings inequality (Table EQ2.1). I have made wide use in the past of data for the mid to late 1990s circulated in the OECD Employment Outlook, which are now dated. The new […]
Read morehttp://research.cibcwm.com/economic_public/download/srpt_rrsp_022007.pdf An interesting piece on retirement savings from CIBC. It highlights the huge increase in unused RRSP contribution room in recent years, and the widening contribution gap between higher and lower income Canadians. As of 2005, the median total asset value of RRSPs held by pre retirement persons aged 55-65 was just $60,000 – hardly enough to secure a decent […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070223/d070223a.htm Philip Cross of Statscan has writen an interesting analysis of our very weak labour productivity performance in 2006. Output per hour growth has been very slow – a result of weak output growth combined with fairly strong job growth. The key factor highlighted here is declining productivity in the mining sector as production shifts to less accessible resources, and […]
Read morehttp://papers.nber.org/papers/W12910 An instructive – and admittedly interesting – example of the proclivity of economists to reduce almost everything to rationalist explanations. Attack Assignments in Terror Organizations and The Productivity of Suicide Bombers Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi NBER Working Paper No. 12910 Issued in February 2007 NBER Program(s):Â Â Â LS Â Â Â POL This paper studies the relation between human capital of suicide bombers […]
Read more An interesting and informed reflection on the sources of rising inequality - seen as not reducible to “skill biased technological change”, with the usual cop out that almost all of the answer lies in education and training. http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2007/20070206/default.htm Remarks by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke Before the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce, Omaha, Nebraska February 6, 2007 The Level and Distribution […]
Read moreI was at a forum on labour shortages in Canada yesterday, organized by the Canadian Association of Sector Councils. (These consist of industry plus some labour representatives who undertake labour force planning activities, sometimes including sponsorship and promotion of training.) There was an interesting clash of economic and employer perspectives on the labour shortages issue. Mike McCracken from Informetrica kicked-off […]
Read moreA big conference on this topic – and key Conservative promise – gets underway in Toronto today. Here’s a CLC commentary, from Executive Vice-President Barb Byers.. “ The Federal government has been busy introducing Canadians to the idea of “Patient Wait-Times Guaranteesâ€. If patients are unable to receive treatment in a timely manner, Conservatives argue, the public health system […]
Read more Posted below – An attack on expected linkage between trade and labour standards by the new US Congress by Bhagwati et al in the Financial Post, and a response by Global Unions. Fast-track renewal could lead to tougher demands on the poor By Jagdish Bhagwati, Alan Deardorff, Koichi Hamada, Parvin Krishna and Arvind Panagariya Published: February 2 2007 02:00 […]
Read moreThere’s a lot of dis-information in today’s Globe, especially from Jeffrey Simpson, re the supposed impossibility of Canada achieving our Kyoto commitments. In fact, the Kyoto protocol clearly allows us to make up for any shortfall in domestic emission reductions through the Clean Development Mechanism. As Matthew Bramley from the Pembina Institute told the Commons Committee on Bill C-288 (which […]
Read moreThe December, 2006 OECD Economic Outlook (full text unavailable on line) points to sudden tax revenue windfalls in most member countries due to large capital gains and the fact that “the process of income and wealth distributions becoming more skewed has picked up pace lately …. and may be interacting with progressive tax systems to produce more than usual increases […]
Read moreThe minimum wage debate is heating up once again, with the NDP and labour strongly pushing for a minimum wage of at least $10 per hour in Ontario and at the federal level (as recently recommended by the Arthurs Report.) Anti poverty groups and the Toronto Star now strongly endorse a decent minimum wage as part of an anti poverty […]
Read moreI don’t entirely agree with Jim Stanford that RRSPs are a bad way to save for those not fortunate enough to be covered by a good pension plan, but I am struck by the absence of sober, independent analysis as we head into RRSP season. Today’s special Report on RRSPs in the Globe and Mail is, predictably, totally uncritical, and […]
Read moreThe Communications Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP) organized a lively and informative forum on the forest industry crisis today on Parliament Hill, bringing together leading union, community, industry and environmental spokespersons. Some 20,000 jobs have been lost over the past three years due to literally scores of mill closures in both the pulp and paper and lumber sectors, devastating rural […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070116/d070116a.htm One thing we don’t know about the current round of manufacturing job losses is what is happening to laid-off workers – though employment rates are slipping for older male workers in Ontario and Quebec, and even a supposedly “tight” job market is generating little if any real wage growth for most workers. This suggests that many affected by layoffs […]
Read moreI have just finished reading, and highly recommend, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot (Doubleday Canada, 2006.) Monbiot is a columnist for The (UK) Guardian, probably best known for his work on environmental issues. He sets himself the difficult task of devising a credible plan to reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions by 90% from current […]
Read moreThe World Trade Organisation We Could Have Had Now is the time to rediscover John Maynard Keynes’s revolutionary ideas for an international trade organisation and adapt them to rebalance the world’s economies in the 21st century. Susan George THE Doha agenda, launched at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial meeting in the Qatari capital in 2001, has collapsed, and a […]
Read moreRecent publicity given to the CCPA report on the huge gap between the compensation of CEOs and ordinary workers should prompt some discussion on what should be done about it. Part of the answer undoubtedly lies in reforms to corporate governance. Shareholders can potentially exert some control over the compensation committees of Boards of Directors who set senior executive pay […]
Read moreNeil Reynolds is at it again in today’s Report on Business (not available on line), defining poverty out of existence by questioning the reliability of standard statistical measures. His main point in a somewhat confused argument is that poverty rates are over-stated by conventional income-based measures such as the LICO. Reynolds argues that the poor – according to consumption surveys […]
Read moreA useful piece on the ‘new’ Danish Economy and why it works by Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at the (American) New Republic and a senior fellow at Demos, a US-based national, non-partisan public policy, research and advocacy organization. NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA AWAITS. Great Danes by Jonathan Cohn Post date: 01.03.07 Issue date: 01.15.07 If you want a lower standard […]
Read moreI recently had occasion to re-read Jim Stanford’s contribution to an excellent CCPA book on Paul Martin’s Record (Hell and High Water), in which Jim pointed out that fiscal retrenchment in Canada under the Chretien government had been far, far more severe than the OECD norm. Few Canadians seem to perceive just how exceptional Canada has been compared to the […]
Read morehttp://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/index.html Campaign 2000 have released a new report card based mainly on some number crunching by the Canadian Council on Social Development. Among the more interesting findings: The child poverty rate has been essentially unchanged over the past three years (2001- 2004), (and indeed gradually rising by the most commonly used post tax LICO measure). It remains well above the […]
Read more http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1979785,00.html A return to the politics of envy could serve us well As inequality grows, the country becomes nastier. We should be seriously unrelaxed about the existence of the filthy rich Peter Wilby Friday December 29, 2006 The Guardian I hope the employees of Goldman Sachs and other City firms who netted a reported £9bn in end-of-year bonuses – with […]
Read morehttp://www.morganstanley.com/views/gef/index.html#anchor4105 Global: From Globalization to Localization Stephen Roach | New York On one level, there seems to be no stopping the powerful forces of globalization. Not only has the world just completed four years of the strongest global growth since the early 1970s, but in 2006, cross-border trade as a share of world GDP pierced the 30% threshold for the […]
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