Author Archives: wciecon
It lives!
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative is now on WordPress – if you’re reading this, you’ve found our new site.
Conclusion
Typepad has just informed me that it will be shutting down on September 30, and Worthwhile Canadian Initiative will go down with it. We had a good run.
Healthy 80 year olds need FIT tests
There is a trade-off in cancer screening. On the one hand, older people are more likely to get cancer – as the chart shows, colorectal cancer incidence rates rise with age. On the other hand, the number of years one can expect to live decreases as one gets older. If a cancer is slow growing […]
What explains the weak growth in total factor productivity in non-renewable resource extraction industries?
McMaster University’s Oliver Loertscher and Pau Pujolas have a recent article in the Canadian Journal of Economics entitled “Canadian productivity growth: Stuck in the oil sands”. Here is the abstract: We study the behaviour of Canadian Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth over the past 60 years. We find that the observed stagnation during the last 20 years […]
No, your kids don’t want your stuff
Dining room sets that cost thousands of dollars new can be picked up for a few hundred dollars (or less) on Kijiji or Craigslist. Here’s a quote from typical ad: “Solid wood in Excellent condition. Rarely used. I am moving to a smaller house and it needs to go. Price is negotiable.” It’s part of […]
From tax policy to tax politics.
Notes prepared for a Session in Honour of Robin Boadway II: Emerging Issues in Tax and Transfer Policy, held at the Canadian Economics Association meetings in Toronto, June 1, 2024. The fundamental principles of optimal tax analysis have not changed greatly over the past 50 years. The constraints faced by tax policy makers have. The […]
Good Chart Checklist
Note: this was prepared for my ECON 3403 students, and is a list of all of the mistakes I commonly see in student charts. Please add your suggestions for things to add to this list in the comments – or steal, modify, and use for your own purposes! Good Chart Check List: Is my chart […]
13 facts every Canadian economist needs to know
1. Canada is a big country …but not as big as one might think. Some maps show Canada as an enormous country, about twice the size of China or the US, similar in size to the entire continent of Africa: However maps like the one shown above distort the size of northern countries, making them […]
Movements in income inequality in Canada, 1944-2010
Here are the estimates for the Gini coefficients for Canada, taken from individual tax files (see here for more about where the data came from):
What happened to real incomes in the 1970s?
Here are the estimates for average and median total incomes based on tax file data (see this post for details):
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