Where I live in BC, the provincial government is doing its best to subtlely undermine public health care, rather than make the reforms countless commissions have recommended to make the system better. A full frontal assault is not possible due to the continuing popularity of a public model, but perhaps they think that if they mismanage the system enough and […]
Read moreBest wishes to all for 2007. Thanks to all who stop by the RPE blog to read and add their comments to articles and stories we think are important. This blog began in June 2006 with me starting to post items of interest, but without really telling anyone about it. It gained strength over the Fall once more bloggers joined […]
Read moreWhen it comes to intellectual giants, it is hard to top Einstein. From this article in the Monthly Review in 1949, it looks like he would have made a pretty good economist had he not bothered with all of that “how the universe works” stuff. We know he’d be good at the math. Many economists came over to the dismal […]
Read moreThere is not much positive to write about either Saddam Hussein or the American invasion of Iraq. In his October 11 column, Andrew Coyne lamented North Korea’s nuclear test, but suggested that it would have been even worse had Saddam Hussein still been in power. On October 13, the National Post ran the following letter from yours truly under the […]
Read moreI would like to initiate some discussion about Stephane Dion. I do not see much reason for optimism about his economic policies, but am interested in reading alternative views. After observing that many progressive Canadians seem supportive of Dion, Murray Dobbin convincingly argues that a Liberal majority government would not be more progressive than the current government. However, even Dobbin […]
Read moreOne wonders how much the Government of Canada could recover by offering an amnesty to tax evaders who come forward and pay up, followed by a serious effort to identify and prosecute those who do not. The Times December 30, 2006 Mystery billionaire pays $200m in back tax – and keeps a state afloat Chris Ayres in Los Angeles $200m […]
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 moreA nice summary of the legacies of Galbraith and Friedman, with a strong plug for Galbraith and what the economics profession lacks due to his death. I should note that the Progressive Economics Forum will be creating a John Kenneth Galbraith Prize at this year’s Canadian Economics Association meetings. Jamie Galbraith has given his backing and will be in Halifax […]
Read moreCompare and contrast. First, the “soft landing” view, from Carlos Leitao, Chief Economist of The Laurentian Bank, as quoted in the Globe and Mail: [T]he Canadian economy is in the midst of â€a significant slowdown that we still think should be relatively short-lived. Nevertheless, the downside risks are important and far outweigh upside risks.†[T]he U.S. economy â€has proven to […]
Read moreAtlantica is the brain child of Brian Lee Crowley of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, and current senior advisor in the federal Department of Finance. I had thought that this was a case for some sort of deep integration between the Canadian Atlantic provinces and the US northeastern states – a case that would be hopelessly undermined by the […]
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 […]
Read moreI have posted below a response by a senior Government of Caanda official to my earlier post on why the Canadian econmy is operating below capacity – the core subtance of which is to suggest that wages are too low to stimulate needed productvity gains. A somewhat usuual, out of mainstream response… > This was a nice note Andrew. I […]
Read moreThe Vancouver Sun story below should be filed under “we told you so”. The CCPA released a few papers on this very issue by Ross Klein, a Newfoundland-based cruise ship expert. The most recent was sixteen months ago, and focussed specifically on the BC industry. Here is what it said: BC also risks becoming the toilet of the Pacific Northwest, […]
Read moreLarry Elliott, writing in The Guardian’s Comment is Free area, on Thailand’s capital controls and its subsequent capitulation: A financial U-turn Thailand’s use of capital controls was intended to penalise short-term investors – but the market reaction was swift and brutal. December 20, 2006 07:04 PM It’s not often I feel sorry for military regimes, but I must confess to […]
Read moreThis is scary: The Concerns of Comptroller of the Currency About the Excesses in the Mortgage Market Nouriel Roubini | Dec 18, 2006 A colleague in the financial sector pointed to my attention a speech that the Comptroller of the Currency – John Duggan – has recently given where he expressed some serious concerns about the growth of exotic mortgages […]
Read moreFormer Vancouver city councillor Gordon Price coins a new term, the “Katrina moment”, of which Vancouver has had a few this Fall. The latest was a fiece windstorm that passed through early Friday morning. Almost everyone I’ve talked to was awakened around 3:30 am by the howling wind, which approached but just fell short of the all-time wind speed record […]
Read moreAnother over the top tirade in today’s Globe from Neil Reynolds for whom “equality is the stuff of gulags and guillotines.” (Dion Gets it Wrong on Real Freedom. Globe and Mail. December 15.)  Mr Reynolds appears to be entirely unfamiliar with the best comparative empirical resarch on the topic, generally available from from the Luxemburg Income Survey (ww.lis.org)  which specializes in comparative […]
Read moreGiven some recent discourse on unions in our comments area, I decided to reach back to a fairly comprehensive literature survey on the empirical evidence about unions. The report comes not from the CCPA, CAW or CLC, nor does it come from the ILO, but from the World Bank. It is a rather weighty tome, published in 2002, and can […]
Read moreThere was a fair amount of media coverage of the new data on assets and debt from the 2005 Survey of Financial Security released by Stats Can last week (Daily, December 7); less so of the very useful companion research paper on wealth inequality by StatsCan researchers Morissette and Zhang published in the latest issue of Perspectives. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/75-001-XIE/11206/high-1.htm As noted […]
Read moreAn article in Statistics Canada’s Daily notes that the value of Canadian factory shipments hit a two-year low in October. Because manufacturing includes petroleum products, this development largely resulted from the recent oil-price drop. The inclusion of resource-processing industries means that the value of “manufacturing” shipments partly reflects commodity prices. In my view, the more interesting statistic is that the […]
Read moreIt is the policy that dare not speak its name. For the better part of the last 20 years, the idea of a guaranteed annual income (GAI), a government funded unconditional annual income floor below which no family or individual can fall, has been met with ridicule, dismissal, silence and, more often than not, legislation that does the exact opposite […]
Read moreA recommended article by Paul Krugman on US inequality trends appears in the Rolling Stone Review of Economics, The Great Wealth Transfer.
Read moreAs we head into the Christmas holidays and many of us look forward to spending some time away from work with our families, it’s worth noting that there is great inequality among Canadian workers in terms of access to paid vacation leave, and big gaps compared to other industrial countries. The statutory minimum in Canada varies by province, and is just […]
Read moreEric Reguly on the Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance and Big Oil, from today’s Globe: Oil sands may be federal Tories’ Achilles heel … For the opposition parties, the beauty of the oil sands is that you can point to them. The visuals are appropriately disturbing. You can see the gaping holes in the earth, you can measure the water flows, […]
Read moreA letter to the Prime Minister from Scientists For A Healthy Environment, which doubles as an effective critique of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act: Dear Prime Minister, We are writing to encourage your Government to make significant improvements to Canada ‘s overarching pollution law, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA). Canada has a growing pollution problem that is a threat […]
Read moreI balked at purchasing some tickets this weekend because of the rapacious service charges of Ticketmaster. The cost of the tickets was already pretty high, at $38.50, but that just seems to be the going rate these days. Generally, I do not begrudge the escalating cost of live performances because artists make most of their money this way, and the […]
Read more(This note was prepared for a meeting of trade union economists with Paul Jenkins, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, to be held on Monday, December 11, 2006.) Introduction The Bank of Canada believes that the Canadian economy is currently operating “just above†capacity, justifying this week’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged despite a noticeable slowdown in economic […]
Read moreIt seems to me that, compared to an international free-trade agreement, TILMA provides none of the potential benefits (i.e. tariff reductions) and all of the costs (i.e. regulations harmonized to the lowest common denominator and businesses suing governments). As Marc noted below, the Government of BC claims that TILMA could add $4.8 billion to provincial GDP. A Government of Quebec […]
Read moreBC and Alberta signed a new agreement earlier this year to reduce interprovincial barriers to trade. The Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement (TILMA) is due to go into effect in April 2007. Apparently Saskatchewan and Ontario are now considering signing on as well. While it is widely believed in business circles that there exist large barriers to trade within […]
Read more“Canada’s New Government improves protection against hazardous chemicals” says the press release. This item fits in the “ounce of prevention” file, but is also another one for the “opportunistic Harper government” file.On prevention, Canada has been slowly getting its act together with regard to the growing evidence that thousands of untested and unregulated chemicals in the environment are connected with […]
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