Gender Wage Gap hurts Economic Growth
BREAKING NEWS: Women are paid less than men across OECD countries. OK, it’s not breaking news. Not even close. In Canada the ‘Female to Male earnings ratio’ has hovered around…
productivity
The Conservative Economic Record
Sept 2012: Unemployment is up at 7.4%; it has been increasing since June while American unemployment has only gone down. July 2012: Worst trade deficit ever in Canadian history at…
Selective Amnesia at the Bank of Canada
A guest blog from Marc Lavoie and Mario Seccareccia, Department of Economics, University of Ottawa In a speech delivered on October 4th to the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce (see: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2012/10/speeches/a-measure-of-work/),…
Track the Small Things for Big Happiness
Teresa Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School who has researched diary keeping and has made a very nifty realization: even keeping a few thoughts a day can amount…
Canada Already Has A 1¢ Carbon Tax
Last year this Conservative government collected $424,418,000 in taxes to pay for carbon emissions. That same year Canadians used 38,208,346,000 litres of gasoline. Doing the quick math, Canadians paid 1.1¢…
Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kady points out that despite the Cons’ best efforts to stonewall, the Robocon investigation in Guelph looks to have locked in on the…
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…
Canadians Should Envy Greeks
Canadians aren’t too envious of Greeks, Italians, and Egyptians right now, but maybe they should be. Though Canada has a relatively better economy and a stable political system, the other…
Canada’s Self-Imposed Crisis in Post-Secondary Education
On June 7, I gave a keynote address to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees Education Sector Conference. My PowerPoint presentation (with full references) can be found at this link.…
Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – For much of the relatively recent past, one of the areas of relative consensus in economic theory is that productivity increases would find…
New Generation of Thinkers Link Inequality, Innovation and Prosperity
<em>This guest blog was written by Mike Marin and Anouk Dey. It originally appeared in the Toronto Star on February 24. The authors are part of a team that produced…
Drummond’s Productivity “Puzzle.”
Don 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…
Economic Climate and Inequality
The December issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication I produce is now on-line. This issue has a number of pieces on issues of inequality, including: Rising inequality…
Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Bruce Campbell comments on the link between rising inequality and declining democracy, while Rachel Mendleson notes that the erosion of workplace democracy and…
Keynesian Productivity
Statistics Canada released an interesting study today on the slowdown of productivity growth in Canadian manufacturing. Conservative economists tend to view productivity as a microeconomic issue, reflecting the allocation of…
Invisible Hand Has Failed Canadian Innovation
The Globe and Mail is running an interesting series this week on Canada’s miserable performance in business innovation and productivity. Here is the main page. Barrie McKenna’s long piece on…
Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jim Stanford points out that when it comes to manufacturing, any talk of an “invisible hand” doing much for productivity is based purely…
Who’s over or under-paid?
We all know that the wages and compensation individuals receive in private competitive markets reflects their productivity, unless pesky unions and government regulations get in the way–because Economics 101 (and…
Geoff Campbell: Student, Communications Assistant, Newspaper Web Editor, and Non-Profit Public Relations Coordinator at Mount Allison University
This year I'm going to be fairly busy. In terms of classes: My Cultural and Political Change class with Dr. Hunt (who just got back from sabbatical at the London…
Shock and Awful – The Truth Behind CIT Cuts
Cutting corporate income taxes doesn’t create jobs. They may raise wages, but probably not for you and me. And they mean Canadian taxpayers are paying more….to help the Americans pay…