Author Archives: wciecon
“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 […]
Meetings with Meaning
As we all head into academic conference season, here is some food for thought with a guest post by Steve Morgan. Enjoy. Livio.
Mary Jane and Milton
Milton Friedman – Nobel Laureate in Economics and adviser to Ronald Reagan – supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Stephen Easton's classic paper advocating marijuana legalization was published by the Fraser Institute. Why do so many right-leaning economists favour marijuana legalization? Conservative economists typically believe that a person is a best judge of what is in […]
Those Who Forget History
From today's Globe and Mail: In the decades prior to 2000, Canada made progress in moving away from being an economy of resource extraction. By that year, as labour economist Jim Stanford has pointed out in an analysis for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, well over half of Canada’s exports consisted of an increasingly sophisticated […]
Drugs heal, drugs hurt.
There are those who use drugs, and there are those who could, potentially, benefit from drugs. The two groups do not always coincide:
Employment, Economic Comparisons and EU Trade
Despite continually being told that Canada has been one of the top economic performers throughout the recent world recession and financial crisis, we are not content to rest on our laurels and it appears that we continue to strive for better things. Canada is in the process of negotiating a comprehensive Free Trade agreement with […]
Are quantities backward-looking or forward-looking?
I've been reading three things this morning: Chris Dillow, responding to my earlier post. Chris says that expectations (of future monetary policy) are a "weak lever". Roger Farmer, showing that lagged stock prices plus lagged unemployment have really good out-of-sample forecasting properties for unemployment. Paul Krugman, saying: "As I read it, price and wage setting […]
Who owns her body?
Girl Model tells the story of a Russian child, Nadya, who goes to Japan to break into modeling. She is 13 years old, alone, powerless, penniless – and speaks not a word of English or Japanese. [Spoiler alert]
Identity Economics
Here are two macroeconomic identities: 1. Y=C+I+G+NX 2. MV=PY Both are true by definition.
How much do expectations matter?
It is a cliche (among economists) to say that expectations matter. It is even more of a cliche to say that expectations matter for asset prices. But how much do expectations matter? I'm going to do a quick and dirty back of the envelope calculation to show that expectations matter a lot. And that the […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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