Monthly Archives: May 2011
Why is there HST on used furniture?
The harmonized sales tax is a value added tax. At each stage of production, the government collects taxes on the value added at that stage. Suppose, for example, a carpenter buys $10,000 worth of wood, makes it into furniture, and sells the furniture for $15,000. At a 12% tax rate, the carpenter pays $1,200 HST […]
Should economists be licensed?
In the US, as in most other OECD countries, unionization rates have been falling for decades. Yet this decline has been counter-balanced by a rise in professional licensing. This picture, taken from Kleiner and Krueger (ht Thomas Lemieux), says it all:
Cities, Capital Cities and Economic Performance
It is the conventional wisdom that urban centers with their concentrations of human and physical capital and their dense social networks are engines of growth. One exception to this is can be the case where a dominant urban center by virtue of its institutional monopoly on a country or region’s economic life is able to […]
How not to evaluate immigration policy
The Fraser Institute has released a study on immigration policy, but there's not much point in telling you its conclusions: the questions they ask are not worth answering.
Why it’s hard to profit from northern asparagus
Life explodes in springtime: green grass, flowers, blossoms. Asparagus, strawberries, rhubarb. Fiddleheads. These seasonal crops all thrive in northern climates. So why is it hard to grow them profitably? There are boring, obvious explanations: labour costs, the high Canadian dollar, and so on. This post explores another reason for asparagus unprofitability. Canadian asparagus is ready […]
As the Border turns: Cross-Border Shopping Revisited
According to a report in the May 11th edition of the Globe and Mail, the U.S. government is pressing the Canadian federal government to loosen the rules so that fewer Canadians have to stop and pay duties as they return from a trip to the United States: “The personal exemption issue has been formally raised […]
Are gifted education programs a waste of money?
In my latest Globe and Mail piece, I summarized a study by Sa Bui, Steven G. Craig, and Scott Imberman on the effectiveness of gifted education. The authors look at students in a large urban American school district who were evaluated for gifted programming in grade five. They ask: Who does better on the grade 6 and 7 […]
The 2011 election and Somebody Else’s Problem
In Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams posited the existence of 'SEPs': An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem…. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly […]
The echoes of internment
The internment of Japanese-Canadians during the second World War was one of the less noble points in Canadian history. But this post is not about guilt or shame. Economists are increasingly aware that history matters. A recent survey by the Harvard-based Canadian economist Nathan Nunn describes how decisions made centuries ago – for example, the types of […]
People of Plenty
American historian David Potter’s book People of Plenty argued that resource abundance shaped the American attitude towards possibility and opportunity. Abundant resources set the stage for wealth accumulation and created a society that believes that everyone can become rich through their own work and effort and that initiative and opportunity are the key to social […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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