Author Archives: wciecon
Reading Amartya Sen on Poverty and Famines
The shut down of entire sectors of the economy in response a pandemic is akin to a crop failure. Both represent a sudden, large and unexpected decline in production. Both leave people without resources, without the wherewithall to command the necessities of life. So I am revisiting Amartya Sen's 1981 monograph Poverty and Famines (ungated), […]
This is no virus for old men
Statistics Canada has just released a dataset with detailed anonymized information on all confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada, available for download here. Unlike many of the available trackers, the Statistics Canada data reports cases by date of onset, defined as "earliest date available from the following series: Symptom Onset Date, Specimen Collection Date, Laboratory Testing […]
Relative supply shocks, Unobtainium, Walras’ Law, and the Coronavirus
Here's the basic idea: A temporary 100% output cut in 50% of the sectors (what the Coronavirus does) is very different from a 50% output cut in 100% of the sectors (what our intuitions might expect from supply shocks in aggregate macro models). The former can easily lead to deficient demand in the unaffected sectors; […]
Regional disparities in hospital bed access across Canada
Thank you to Kayle Hatt and Kevin Andrew for generating some of the numbers and charts behind this post, and for helpful suggestions. The number of acute care hospital beds per capita is an imperfect measure of a health care system's ability to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, beds are easy to acquire, […]
Covid-19, Italy and Lessons for Canada
by Thomas Barbiero, Ryerson University and Livio Di Matteo, Lakehead University As Italo-Canadese and members of the large Italian diaspora throughout the world, we have found the COVID-19 situation in Italy truly heart-wrenching. As we write, Italy is the hardest hit country outside of China with over 60,000 confirmed cases and over 6,000 deaths. The […]
How prepared is your hospital for COVID-19?
I've written a blog post for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP). It begins: One widely touted response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to “flatten the curve” — to spread COVID-19 infections over time, so that the medical system can cope with them. Yet a cold hard look at the numbers suggests our […]
Postmodern Economic Measurement: There is no number, only numbers
National income accounting distills a nation's economy into a single number: gross domestic product. GDP has been critiqued many times for its neglect of household production, environmental degradation, income distribution, and so on. Many alternatives have been proposed, such as genuine progress indicators, happiness measures, the Human Development Index, the Better Life Index, well-being indexes, […]
Choosing the right target: Real options for the Bank of Canada’s mandate renewal
That's the title of a Max Bell School of Public Policy conference to be held in Montreal on April 30/May 1. I'm quite excited about it. A couple of years ago, I wrote a column scolding the Bank of Canada for the lack of transparency in the mandate renewal process. But after thinking about it […]
Increased Price Flexibility is Destabilising in New Keynesian Models. (And a Price-Level Path Target is Stabilising)
Start with a very simple New Keynesian "IS" (or "Aggregate Demand") equation: y(t) = E[y(t+1)] – a[r(t)-r*(t)] The "real" (inflation-adjusted) interest rate r(t) is defined as the "one period" nominal interest rate, minus expected inflation for the following "one period". In order to stabilise output y(t), relative to expected future output E[y(t+1)], the central bank […]
Does (cohort) size matter?
In the US, the portion of young men between the ages of 18 to 34 who report having at least one partner has fallen substantially in recent years (sorry for the small image size): Charts similar to the one above have prompted talk of a sex recession. Yet worries that Millennials are killing sex (as […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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