TFSAs: Cutting Taxes for the Affluent
The latest issue of the Canadian Tax Journal has a number of articles on Tax-Free Savings Accounts. Among the papers of interest: Kevin Milligan projects the potential tax impact of…
Andrew Jackson
Labour Losing to Capital
The just-released OECD Employment Outlook – full text not available on line – has an interesting chapter on the sharp decline of labour’s share of national income in virtually all…
Unions and Democracy
Further to Jim’s post on the recent ratcheting up of the war on unions, I note that Hudak’s lead argument is that voluntary union membership is needed to “make unions…
More on the OECD and Dutch Disease
Further to my earlier post on the OECD and “Dutch Disease”, I have received a heavily redacted response to an access to information request (A-2012-00073/CN.) submitted to the Department of…
Small Businesses NOT Big Net Job Creators
Small business – or at least the CFIB – consistently claim to be the big job creators in the economy. This has never been borne out by the available data…
Deflating Housing Bubble Risks Recession
Seen in isolation, Finance Minister Flaherty probably did the right thing yesterday in seeking to safely deflate the housing bubble and lower the dangerous growth of household credit to a…
Marc Lavoie and Monetary Economics
There is a very interesting interview with PEF’s own Marc Lavoie here on the Naked Capitalism site on his new book. Monetary Economics was co-authored by Marc with the late…
Growth After Financial Capitalism
A thoughtful short essay by Wolfgang Streeck, concluding with a reflection on how extreme inequality gets in the way of a needed de-emphasis on crude economic growth.
In Memoriam: Perspectives on Labour and Income
Another sad tombstone to the shrinkage of information for informed social and economic policy – Statscan has decided to discontinue “Perspectives on Labour and Income” in both print and online…
Incomes Flat in “Recovery Year” of 2010
Today’s Statscan release of income data for 2010 allow for a backward glance at the state of the recovery. What is most striking is that – following two years of…
Canada, the IMF and the G20
The Harper government decided to attack Thomas Mulcair on the issue of Canadian support for additional IMF resources to deal with the euro area crisis, implying that Canadian taxpayers should…
OECD Agrees We Suffer From Dutch Disease
OECD economist Peter Jarrett – lead on the just released Economic Survey of Canada – agrees with the Mulcair diagnosis.
The Budget, Employment Insurance and the Unemployed
Following are the notes on which I based presentations to the Senate National Finance Committee on June 6 and the House of Commons Finance Committee on May 29. They summarize…
Record Low Interest Rates Mean Governments Can Save By Borrowing More
Today’s record low interest rates on long term Canadian government bonds present a fantastic opportunity to save money by borrowing more. Back last December I wrote a post pointing out…
Youth Unemployment
Here’s the link to a TVO The Agenda panel I was on this Friday. Good to put some focus on the fact that the “real” unemployment rate for young people…
A New Stage of the Crisis?
Until quite recently, it seemed that the global economy was set for an extended period of stagnation, lacking an obvious engine of growth in the advanced economies as households deleveraged,…
Dutch Disease, the Canada – US Exchange Rate and Trade With Asia
Today’s Globe editorial provides further evidence of distorted economic reasoning being rolled out to attack Thomas Mulcair. “Mr. Mulcair seems to long for a golden age of manufacturing and a…
Implications of Inequality
I, Jason Clemens from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and David Macdonald from the CCPA discussed the social and economic implications of growing income inequality on an ipolitics panel yesterday. Jason was…
The Economics of EI “Reform”
Changes to the EI rules announced by the government today are not rooted in any lengthy policy rationale. But Minister Finley and and the media release spoke to the need…
Key EI Data No Longer Available
As Heather Scoffield of Canadian Press reports here, Statistics Canada are no longer publishing key EI data because HRSDC have stopped providing it. Data on the dollar value of EI…