Monthly Archives: March 2006
Encouraging news on income and wages
From today’s StatsCan Daily: Canadian families with two or more people had an estimated median income after taxes of $54,100 [in 2004], up about 2% from 2003 in real terms after adjusting for inflation. and Statistics Canada’s low-income rate measures the percentage of families below the low-income cutoff (LICO). The LICO is a statistical measure […]
Economic growth and convergence
One of the main predictions of standard neoclassical growth models is convergence. If there are diminishing returns to capital, countries that have relatively higher levels of capital will have lower rates of return on investment than will countries in which capital is relatively scarce. Since poor countries offer higher rates of return on investment, they […]
Waiting for the pass-through
There are two list prices of my copy of Freakonomics: $C 34.95 and $US 25.95. Yesterday’s closing CAD-USD exchange rate was 0.8642. This means that that if you had $C 30,000 handy, you could exchange that for $US 26,000, drive across the border, buy 1000 copies of Freakonomics, cross back again and sell them for […]
Tuition: Ontario goes in the right direction
Yesterday, the Ontario government announced that it would lift the freeze on tuition fees that it had imposed two years ago, and that it would expand its program of aid for students from low-income households. Student debt is an important issue, but it doesn’t affect all students: only about half of those who graduate with […]
The Bank of Canada raised interest rates today
The overnight rate was increased 25 basis points to 3.75%. Information on the Canadian and global economies received since the January Monetary Policy Report Update has been broadly in line with the Bank’s expectations, although the Canadian dollar has recently moved above the range that had been assumed in the Update. Real gross domestic product […]
The Bank of Canada will raise interest rates tomorrow
The Bank of Canada has increased its target for the overnight rate by 25 basis points four times in a row, from 2.50% to 3.50%, and if its January monetary policy report is anything to go by, it seems intent on continuing this trend. Output continues to hover around the Bank’s estimate of capacity, and […]
The anatomy of anti-economics
I recently had occasion to re-read Paul Krugman’s "Pop Internationalism", and this passage from ‘The illusion of conflict in international trade’ jumped out at me. His point of reference is international economics, but in my experience it also applies to other fields as well: As far as I can tell, the attitude of policy-minded intellectuals […]
Bad economics: weekly roundup
Tuesday’s announcement of the 2005Q4 GDP numbers provides the background for this week’s entries. First up is Jim Stanford’s column in Monday’s Globe and Mail, in which he notes that profits have been growing strongly, but Unfortunately, the investment response to this inflow has been uninspiring, to say the least. Corporate capital spending has grown […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments