Monthly Archives: November 2006
Canada’s Q3 GDP release: Not pretty, and likely to get uglier
We’ve had a run of decent numbers recently: employment and wage growth doing okay, and the current account surplus improved last quarter. But the Q3 GDP numbers don’t look good at all. It’s not that the quarterly growth rate itself – 1.7%, a bit shy of the 2% forecasters had been expecting – was so […]
Low productivity growth is a problem. Subsidising R&D isn’t the solution
One of the ideas floating around in the wake of the federal govt’s economic update is the notion that more should be done to promote research and development in Canada. The usual way of promoting this project is to play up the link between R&D, technical progress and productivity: if the payoff from subsidising R&D […]
How to present a paper (or act as a discussant)
Good advice from Carleton University’s Nick Rowe: Every time I go to the [Canadian Economics Association] meetings I get disappointed at how poorly many of the papers are presented. At the risk of offending someone, I want to give some advice on how best to present a paper (or act as discussant): Presenters should concentrate […]
‘Canada? It’s a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there’
Looking through The Economist story on the outlook for consumer spending over the Christmas season, I came across this graph: You’ll see every G-7 country there but one – Canada (okay, Japan’s not there either, but that’s because Christmas is less of a consumer spending season there). And you’ll also see forecasts for Ireland, Portugal, […]
The Intelligent Design theory of economics
Mark Thoma at Economist’s View has been wading through what non-economists think of economics, and he’s finding the exercise somewhat frustrating. For someone who hasn’t had formal training in the field, anti-economics is often more persuasive than the real thing. Paul Krugman ran into this particular brick wall a few years ago, and realised that […]
“But the pension fund was just sitting there”
The federal government’s economic update was released the other day, complete with the eye-catching proposal to be "debt-free" by 2021. I don’t know what’s worse: that the Conservatives expected it to be swallowed, or the fact that some journalists did. It turns out that the measure of debt they’re talking about is "net debt", which […]
The Bank of Canada says “It ain’t broke, so we’re not fixin’ it”
To the surprise of very few observers, the Bank of Canada is sticking to the policy that got it to its (quite enviable) current situation: Joint Statement of the Government of Canada and the Bank of Canada on the Renewal of the Inflation-Control Target The primary objective of Canada’s monetary policy is to enhance the […]
Income-splitting: An expensive way to solve a small problem, and to make a bigger problem worse
The Conservatives are floating the idea of income-splitting, and Andrew Coyne – who has apparently read Jean-Yves Duclos’ Innis Lecture that I referred to here – approves on the basis of fairness: For once, the crass appeal to the base is also the perfect means of broadening the base; the cynical vote-buying thing is also […]
Ban the penny. And the nickel, while we’re at it
There’s a debate at the WSJ online about the pros and cons to keeping the penny. My view is that we should toss the penny and the nickel altogether. The reason is simple: today’s dime has the buying power of a penny circa 1946 in both Canada and the US. I defy you to go […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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