Monthly Archives: June 2012
Competition between unions
Suppose you were a believer in the benefits of canoes. You want as many Canadians as possible to own a canoe. You would presumably want to encourage competition between different canoe manufacturers, so they would compete on price and quality, so that price would be lower and/or quality would be higher, so that more Canadians […]
“Does monetary policy have (bad) distributional consequences?”
Some questions are bad questions. This is one of them. We can get a clearer and more useful answer if we change the question. We can avoid wasting a lot of time arguing at cross purposes. Here's a better question: "If we used fiscal policy instead of monetary policy to remove a shortage of aggregate […]
Who benefits from the oil sands? Who benefits from saying that only Alberta does?
This didn't pass my sniff test: The economic benefits of oil sands development, while considerable, are unevenly distributed across the country, making interprovincial tensions understandable. While provinces other than Alberta are projected to benefit, modelling by the Canadian Energy Research Institute projects that 94 per cent of the GDP impact of oil sands development will […]
Would eliminating milk quotas be a Pareto improvement?
Today I looked at last week's public finance exam, and got an all-too-familiar sinking feeling: I've asked a question that's almost impossible to answer. Here it is: Currently the production of milk in Canada is restricted through a system of quotas. Eliminating quotas on milk production in Canada is best described as:a. A potential Pareto […]
Abolish the Equity Premium Now!
This post is slightly whimsical. I can't decide myself if I'm being totally serious. My argument is certainly less than watertight. But it's not (to me) obviously wrong either. So I'm just throwing it out there.
Two ‘what ifs’ about Canadian macroeconomic policy during the recession
There's a lot for econobloggers in the US and Europe to get exercised about. They are facing serious problems, and their policy makers have demonstrated an alarming inability to deal with them. It's harder for Canadian econobloggers – okay, for this particular econoblogger – to put together arguments documenting how Canadian policy makers got things […]
New Limits, Same Issues
Well, nearly a year after the topic was discussed here on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, the Canadian government has loosened the rules on how much Canadian can bring back from the United States.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments