Krugman hardly needs me to leap to his defence against Canadian economic flat earthers like Andrew Coyne, but here goes. Coyne’s latest column argues that there is a recovery underway in the US which owes nothing to Keynesian stimulus. Accordingly, “we can add America post-2008 to the long list of failed experiments in Keynesian demand management.” He charges Krugman with […]
Read moreWith unemployment high and rising, job creation should surely be on the agenda. The Government of Canada has a program called Job Creation Partnerships, funded under Employment Insurance. It supports projects which “provide insured participants with opportunities to gain work experience that will lead to ongoing employment. Activities of the project help develop the community and the local economy.” (2010 […]
Read moreStatistics Canada is sometimes unfairly blamed for decisions made pursuant to budget cuts and to political direction, most notably in the decision to replace the long form Census with a much less reliable Household Survey. But the agency deserves tremendous credit for the decision, implemented just a couple of weeks ago, to provide universal free access to the cornucopia of […]
Read moreAn excellent commentary from Andrew Watt.
Read moreSigh. Here we go again. More evidence-free corporate policy advocacy. The Chamber of Commerce put out a report today – actually I can’t find much in the way of background research on their web site – which points with alarm to labour and skills shortages, and calls for a less generous EI program to get workers to move to the […]
Read moreIt is argued that eligibility for OAS/GIS discourages older Canadians from remaining in the workforce, and that we need to keep them working to avoid labour shortages and a sharp rise in the so-called dependency ratio. But the fact of the matter is that 65 is not the trigger for retirement that it used to be, and that an increasing […]
Read moreNo. Of course not. Even if the government waves around scary large increases in nominal dollar terms. As has been widely reported, the most recent OAS actuarial report shows that total program expenditures will rise from $38.8 billion in 2011 to $107.9 billion in 2030. However, the dollar figure reflects, not just an increase in the number of OAS beneficiaries […]
Read moreCanada’s job market continued to weaken in January as employment rose by a meagre 2,300 jobs, much less than the growth in the number of workers in the labour force. As a result, the national unemployment rate rose from 7.5% to 7.6%. The unemployment rate has been steadily climbing from 7.1% last September, since which time we have lost a […]
Read moreCanadian Press have put out a story based on a research paper by Richard Shillington which was commissioned by HRSDC from Informetrica, and obtained by the CLC through an Access to Information request. Receiving OAS is required to makes seniors eligible for the GIS top up, which provides one in three seniors with a supplement which ensures they have a […]
Read moreTo reprise a now topical earlier blog, hiking the age of eligibility for OAS will have the biggest impact by far on future seniors who are in low income. Many if not most of this group are unable to work due to disability or ill health. If the age of eligibility for OAS and GIS is raised, low income seniors […]
Read moreThe Prime Minister’s speech at Davos was, I would bet, written by Stephen Harper himself. It bore the stamp of his long standing contempt for the European welfare state. He all but said that the Europeans had brought the crisis on themselves through trying to live beyond their fiscal means:  As I look around the world, as I look particularly at developed […]
Read moreRaising the age of eligibility for Old Age Security/Guaranteed Income Supplement (OAS/GIS) benefits is the worst possible way to deal with the retirement income security crisis facing Canadians. Experts such as former Assistant Chief Statistician Michael Wolfson project that one half of all middle income baby boomers face a severe cut to their living standards in old age. This is […]
Read moreThe CLC today celebrated Corporate Tax Freedom Day – defined as the day on which corporations have paid their share of all government taxes. It featured a race of mechanical pigs to a trough full of cash – with the pigs wearing the colours of leading Canadian corporations with large cash reserves. Watch the video. (Update – The Global TV […]
Read moreToday’s IMF economic update further downgrades growth projections, including here in Canada where growth in 2012 is forecast to be just 1.7%, down from the IMF’s September forecast of 1.9%. That is well below the just released Bank of Canada forecast of 2.0%, and clearly implies rising unemployment. On fiscal policy they say: Countries should let automatic stabilizers operate freely […]
Read more Last Thursday I was at an event on the issue of rising income inequality, sponsored by Canada 2020. It featured one of the authors of the recent OECD report on inequality, who highlighted the “skills biased technological change or SBT †hypothesis so favoured by mainstream economists who desperately avoid discussion of inequality as a political as well as economic […]
Read moreThere is a special, free on line, issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics with what look to be very interesting contributions from the progressive side of the spectrum.
Read moreFurther to my earlier post on this topic, whether or not we are or will soon be experiencing labour and skills shortages is a question of critical importance to the development of sound public policy. Next week, we will get some new Statistics Canada data on job vacancies which will help support a more informed discussion. Given projections of very […]
Read moreThe Mark have published a pre Budget commentary from yours truly.
Read moreStatistics Canada’s “real” (R8 supplementary) unemployment rate adds to unemployed persons some labour force dropouts (discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job in the belief that no work is available) and the hours of work lost by part-time workers who would rather have worked full-time. In 2011, the “real” rate averaged 10.6%, up significantly from the […]
Read moreMichael Mendelson has posted a long comment on my earlier post regarding the Mowat Report on EI. He defends Caledon’s proposal for temporary non EI income support for the unemployed as a clear improvement over welfare , and stresses that it is not intended to undermine EI as a social insurance program. I read the Caledon paper – there is […]
Read moreLarry Summers has contributed to a new Financial Times series on Capitalism in Crisis. It merits a read, as an example of tortured reasoning. Summers is the consummate insider neo liberal Democratic economist. A leading academic, he was chief economist of the World Bank, acolyte and then successor to Robert Rubin as the US Secretary to the Treasury under Clinton, […]
Read moreCanada’s population, we are frequently told, is rapidly aging. The big baby boomer cohort is headed out of the workforce, meaning that we face a future of very slow labour force growth and even possible shortages of workers. CIBC Economics has just gone so far as to argue that the Bank of Canada can afford to be more relaxed about […]
Read more(Erin beat me to it but there is some new content here.) Capping a very weak last quarter, Canada’s job market ended 2011 badly as the national unemployment rate rose from 7.4% to 7.5% and we lost 25,500 full time jobs. While part time employment gains offset the losses in full time employment, this was only because of a strong […]
Read moreDon Drummond confesses that he has been wrong to believe that changes in public policies – such as free trade, cuts to corporate taxes, low inflation, the introduction of the GST, balanced budgets and reductions to inter provincial trade barriers (aka the neo liberal agenda) – are the key to improving Canada’s dismal productivity record. For many years the author […]
Read moreAmidst the plethora of media reports on “payroll tax” increases for 2012, there was little mention of increases in benefits. For example, the Toronto Sun,cued by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, reported: If you feel a hand grabbing at your wallet next week, calling the cops won’t do any good because it’s the federal government picking your pocket. It’s that time […]
Read moreThe federal government has failed to take up an historic opportunity to lock in ultra low interest rates on long term Government of Canada bonds. Normally – as outlined in annual debt management reports – the government follows a strategy which is intended to achieve two main goals - low overall debt servicing costs, and stable and predictable bond markets. […]
Read more“Other People’s Money” by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, 2011) is to the novel what the wonderful “Margin Call” is to film – a fictionalized but convincing account of high finance and the crisis of 2008. In this case, the central characters are the old money family owners of a private London investment bank which has incurred huge losses on an in […]
Read moreAs is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1% in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3%Â for persons aged 25 to 54, and 6.2% for those aged 55 and over. What is a little bit more surprising is that the youth unemployment rate, while down from the […]
Read moreMark Carney’s widely publicized speech on the state of the global and domestic economy is worth a careful read. He is bang on in much of his analysis of what ails the advanced economies today – the ongoing deleveraging from a long period of unsustainable public and private debt accumulation relative to GDP in which growth was driven mainly by […]
Read moreThe conventional line has been, no. Our banks were strong. Unlike the US and Europe, no bailout was needed to deal with the global financial crisis of 2008. This line, of course, always conveniently neglected the Extraordinary Financing Framework, or dismissed it as trivial. Now Finance Minister Flaherty – seeking new powers to turn down foreign investments by our banks […]
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