Monthly Archives: December 2007
How will the subprime crisis affect the Canadian economy?
I don’t really know, but that didn’t stop me from accepting an invitation from the local Radio-Canada station to do a radio interview on the subject (in French). You can listen to it here.
How manufacturing employment has fallen
We all know that increasing commodity prices and the resulting appreciation of the CAD has resulted in a reduction in employment in the manufacturing sector: The shift of productive resources out of the manufacturing sector is of course the appropriate response to the relative price movements we’ve seen over the past five years, and the […]
When will the Marshall-Lerner condition kick in?
The CAD appreciation hit a milestone in October, averaging above 1 USD for the first time in over thirty years. And the trade surplus went up. What’s going on? Here’s how the StatsCan release put it: In constant dollar terms, which isolates volume changes, volumes for imports rose 2.7% as prices declined 4.6%. Meanwhile, export […]
On the Canada-US decoupling
There has been a certain amount of discussion about the ‘decoupling’ hypothesis: Economic train wreck in the U.S. would hit Canada, decoupled or not: After subprime, decoupling just might be the most overused word of the year in economics. A quick database search yields hundreds of newspaper stories about the decoupling phenomenon in the past […]
Mercantilism at the Globe and Mail
Today’s Globe and Mail’s editorial on the prospect of a Canada-South Korea trade agreement is just silly: Free trade? First, lower the barriers: To the dismay of some Canadian exporters, free-trade talks with South Korea have reached an impasse. But that shouldn’t be the end of any smart free trader’s world, given South Korea’s refusal […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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