Monthly Archives: May 2012
Canada: No country for old men (or women)
The Canadian population is aging, and getting old sucks – for economies, as well as for people. There is nothing that can stop an individual from aging. Not face cream. Not hot yoga.
When men and women are miles apart….
The Globe and Mail website doesn't cope with data and graphics easily, so I'm reproducing my most recent Economy Lab post, along with data tables that couldn't be included in the G&M piece, here:
Devaluation and the Euro
"Consider a small open economy with fixed exchange rates. Suppose the central bank announces that it will devalue the currency by 50% one year from today. What are the consequences of this announcement?" IIRC, the whole point of the Euro was that questions like that wouldn't make any sense, and so would never need to […]
Defence may be a public good. Military spending isn’t.
Public goods are, as defined by economists, non-rival, meaning that the cost of an additional person using the good is zero, and non-excludable, meaning that it is technologically impossible, or prohibitively costly, to prevent people from enjoying the goods. When something is a pure public good, private markets will fail to supply it in adequate […]
Milton Friedman on the Euro, Inflation Targeting and the Zero Lower Bound, Circa 2000
In 2000 Milton Friedman gave a keynote address to the Bank of Canada, which is available for download here [PDF]. The keynote itself is interesting, but moreso are his responses to a Q&A session, where he talks about issues such as the future euro and monetary policy at the zero lower bound. Here, without commentary, are […]
We Are Not Alone…
One more bit of quick evidence on manufacturing and its share of GDP – this time, international evidence. I found some data from the United Nations for the period 1970 to 2010 and calculated the manufacturing to GDP ratios for Canada, the other six G-7 countries as well as Brazil, China, India, Australia and also […]
Manufacturing exports vs resource exports
The misguided notion that the shift from manufactured exports to resource exports is necessarily a bad thing has taken ferocious hold on many politicians and on much of the punditry. So I'm recycling something I wrote before to explain why it's wrong.
The Decline of Manufacturing in Canada – 1926-2011: Dutch Disease?
The debate about “Dutch Disease” is focused on the relationship between natural resource export booms, currency appreciation and the decline of Canadian manufacturing. I decided it was worth hunting up some long-term data on manufacturing’s share of Canada's economy given that my economic history background tells me that over the long-term, the share of the […]
Who Produces CO2equiv Emissions in Canada
Environment Canada has emissions data on 537 facilities in Canada. As Andrew Leach points out these only cover roughly 35% of emissions in Canada, but they provide some useful data. Unfortunately the emissions are not ranked by who emits the most. So I took it upon myself to do so, with some pretty big technical support […]
“Does Canada have Dutch disease?” is a question without a meaningful answer
The debate about whether or not Canada has "Dutch disease" can never get very far, because there is in fact no clear notion what it is. As far as I'm concerned, the term has by now been stripped of meaning: people are using the definition that is most convenient for their purposes. So in this […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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