My take on today’s release follows: Job Numbers As Statistics Canada noted, “Employment was little changed in July.” Employment growth in Alberta and Ontario was largely offset by job losses in the other eight provinces. As a result, the Canadian labour market created 11,300 new positions in July, far fewer than in previous months. Some commentators argue that the Bank of […]
Read moreLast week, while I was out of the country and away from this blog, the Government of Saskatchewan formally rejected TILMA. The news release announcing this decision quite reasonably unveils working groups to address the few inter-provincial problems that may exist, but strangely refrains from outlining any of the strong arguments against TILMA. However, media reports reflect the Minister’s success […]
Read moreI am big on big investment spending. I’ve argued for years that weak business investment undermines our job creation, our productivity, our incomes, and our competitiveness. I’ve proposed lots of policy measures to stimulate more investment spending: public as well as private. But what’s happening in northern Alberta is enough to nauseate even a Soviet-esque advocate of mass capital accumulation […]
Read moreAgnès Poirier Thursday August 2, 2007 The Guardian Le Tour is dead, long live le vélo! The French vélorution began the day after Bastille day, or day one of the vélib – short for vélo-liberté. With it, millions of Parisians have been able to forget the shame of the Tour de France and make the road theirs, 24 hours a […]
Read morehttp://canadianlabour.ca/updir/Working_People_Deserve_More_Paid_Vacation.pdf Here’s the link to a mini study on statutory rights to paid vacation timey just posted to the CLC web site – we fall well short of European standards and there is a surprising amount of variation in Canada.
Read moreI did not follow the Conrad Black trial, but enjoyed reading Mark Steyn’s mammoth post mortem. In contrast to Marc Lee’s excellent commentary on this blog, Mark Steyn is a die-hard supporter of Black. The post mortem’s main argument is that Black’s legal team did an extremely poor job. In one sense, blaming the lawyers is simply the last ditch […]
Read moreNew CEPR Paper Looks At Venezuela’s Economy During the Chávez Years For Immediate Release: July 26, 2007 Contact: Dan Beeton, 202-293-5380 x104 Washington, DC: A new paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research looks at the Venezuelan economy during the last eight years and finds that it does not fit the mold of an “oil boom headed for […]
Read moreThe US National Bureau of Economic Research have just published a fascinating dissection of top income earners, the ones we know have grabbed a rapidly escalating share of all income. This study provides a wealth of detail on the incomes of those we would suspect to be in the top 0.1% or higher (in 2004 the top 0.1% of US […]
Read moreI watched most of last night’s debate among Democratic Party presidential candidates and vaguely got wind today of Clinton panning Obama’s indication that he would meet with the presidents of Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela. What struck me was that all the candidates who answered this question seemed to accept the lumping together of all these leaders into the […]
Read morehttp://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=978399 A new NBER Working Paper from Beadry, Green and Sand of UBC looks interesting.. Spill-Overs from Good Jobs PAUL BEAUDRY University of British Columbia – Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) DAVID A. GREEN University of British Columbia – Department of Economics BENJAMIN SAND University of British Columbia – Department of Economics April 2007 NBER Working […]
Read moreIt is notable that TD Economics is much more concerned about the scale and impacts of the manufacturing crisis than colleagues like Jeff Rubin at CIBC – not to mention Steve Poloz of Export Development Canada. TD’s recent report on the state of the Toronto economy http://www.td.com/economics/special/db0707_gta.pdf notes that 100,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost in the Greater Toronto Area […]
Read moreA centrepiece of Canada’s industrial policy is attracting foreign investment. This seems to me a lack of imagination on the part of our elites; rather than develop genuine industrial stategies, so much the better to just let foreign capital come and create the jobs for us. And in the resource sector, the flipside of investment is that we lose control […]
Read moreA month ago, I noted that if the Core Consumer Price Index remained unchanged from May to June 2007, the annual core-inflation rate would jump to 2.5% because this Index had fallen from May to June 2006. Today’s release from Statistics Canada reveals that this is exactly what happened. Since the monthly Index remained constant at 109.9, the annual rate […]
Read moreProgressive municipal governments in Canada should consider developing and implementing wage ordinances to boost campaigns for higher statutory minimum wages, and to help the working poor. More than 130 municipal living wage ordinances have been passed in the US since 1994, including in many big cities such as New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, San […]
Read moreAs noted yesterday, Canadian advocates of corporate-tax cuts have proliferated alternative measures of corporate taxes. The C. D. Howe Institute’s “Tax Competitiveness Program,” which largely consists of papers by Jack Mintz and Duanjie Chen, has focused almost exclusively on marginal effective tax rates (METRs) on capital, expressed as percentages of pre-tax rates of return. There have been a couple of […]
Read moreIn recent years, about one-quarter of Canada’s corporate profits and business investment have been in Alberta. The following figures are from Statistics Canada’s Provincial Economic Accounts. As corporate profits have ballooned in Alberta, business investment has not increased as a share of the province’s economy. More than half of this investment has been in non-residential structures (e.g. tar-sands development), leaving […]
Read morePublic hearings proved to be an effective defence against TILMA in Saskatchewan. The following editorial from yesterday’s Halifax ChronicleHerald appropriately concludes, “Nova Scotia should hold public hearings, just like Saskatchewan, if it is toying with joining TILMA or a regional version thereof.” Published: 2007-07-16 Talking trade WHEN corporate Canada thinks of TILMA, it pictures a Chinook – a warm wind […]
Read moreThe New York Times has an interesting piece on the New Gilded Age, with many a multi-millionaire interviewed. Below is a rather unbalanced clipping of some of the more interesting (and progressive) parts of the article: “I don’t see a relationship between the extremes of income now and the performance of the economy,†Paul A. Volcker, a former Federal Reserve […]
Read moreCanada’s corporate-income-tax rates are fairly low compared to other G-7 countries. Advocates of further Canadian corporate-tax cuts have responded to this reality in two ways. First, they promote alternative measures indicating that corporate taxes are higher in Canada than elsewhere. Second, they compare Canada to a much broader range of countries. In the latter vein, The Globe and Mail’s Report on […]
Read moreSome sobering data from the Canadian Community Health Survey http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/surveill/nutrition/commun/income_food_sec-sec_alim_e.html#lex It is recognized that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” (Food and Agriculture Organization 1996). This report reflects the characteristics of food […]
Read moreI’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 moreAsks Paul Krugman: [S]hould we even be giving preferential tax treatment to true capital gains? I’d say no, because there’s very little evidence that taxing capital gains as ordinary income would actually hurt the economy. Meanwhile, the low tax rate on capital gains is one main reason the truly rich often pay lower tax rates than the middle class. A […]
Read moreBack in the 2001 BC election, the Liberals repeatedly made the voodoo economics claim that “tax cuts pay for themselves” as a means of heading off concerns that their tax cuts would inevitably lead to spending cuts. The Liberals won in a landslide, implemented a 25% across-the-board personal income tax cut and dramatically cut corporate income taxes – about $2.3 […]
Read moreThe Atlantic Institute for Market Studies has been calling for the Atlantic provinces to join TILMA. Yesterday, I discussed this proposal with the Halifax ChronicleHerald’s editorial board. The following report was printed in today’s edition. Also yesterday, the CCPA posted a paper based on my submission to the Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on the Economy. Published: 2007-07-12 Labour group […]
Read morehttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070711.wcomment0712/BNStory/Front/home Asks Michael Mendelson from Caledon
Read moreThe spirit of Paul Martin’s budgeting practices lives on at the BC Ministry of Finance. Today, Finance Minister Carole Taylor published the audited public accounts for 2006/07, with a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion surplus, the largest in provincial history. To put this in context, BC’s estimated GDP in 2006 was $179 billion, so the surplus amounts to 2.2% of GDP. Back […]
Read moreBenjamin Tal of CIBC produces a quarterly Canadian Employment Quality Index. The releases from today (July 11) and February 11 provide amazingly different spins on amazingly similar figures. The basic facts are virtually unchanged: -Â Most new employment has been self-employment as opposed to jobs paid by an employer. – Most new employment has been full-time as opposed to part-time. – […]
Read moreDespite our protests on this blog, and Erin Weir chaining himself to the central staircase of the Bank of Canada, our hawks at the Bank raised interest rates today. That is, it raised the overnight rate by a quarter point to 4.5%. The Bank’s press release is a bit unusual in that there is no obvious reason why this move […]
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 […]
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