Author Archives: wciecon
Value-added, externalities and eggs
This was written by U of Alberta's Andrew Leach. It originally appeared on his blog Rescuing the Frog. Today, what I initially thought was a mildly controversial statement about upstream vs. downstream profitability and value-added led to me finding myself with a little bit of egg on my face and also completely baffled about the way we […]
New taxes are usually inefficient or unpopular – and that’s a good thing.
My last post contained a diagram suggesting that no tax is both popular and efficient. On twitter, Matt Cowgill suggested the diagram was wrong. Taxes on resource rents are both popular and efficient. Michael Kushnir suggested carbon taxes as another possibility. If Cowgill and Kushnir are right, then the set of efficient taxes interesects the set of popular taxes:
A Brief Retrospective on the Public Sector
What better way to mark the eve of the Canadian Civic Holiday weekend than with a quick civically engaged overview of the growth of the public sector from a historical perspective. In his 2011 Governments versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State, Vito Tanzi provides a table on general government expenditures as a […]
Feminist triumph or impending disaster?
Right now almost 90 percent of Canadians live in provinces or territories with female premiers. This is a sure indication that Canada's provincial governments are in for a rough ride. It's sometimes called the glass cliff: men are chosen to lead in prosperous times; women are selected to be leaders in times of crisis. Iceland […]
Does the End of Growth Mean the Rise of Inequality?
Classical economics argued that eventually a stationary state or the end of economic growth was going to be reached but they did not forsee the technological change of 19th century industrialization. The result was income and wealth growing by leaps and bounds. However, yet another paper – this time by Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman […]
Smoking and health care expenditures
In an old post, Chris Auld attacked the "zombie argument" that healthy lifestyles substantially decrease demand on the health care system. As he put it: All people — and I do not mean to shock anyone — die some time, even including people who live very healthy lifestyles. Preventing someone from dying of a smoking-related illness only means […]
Mourning Detroit
Well, I have never been to Detroit and have only glimpsed it live from across the river in Windsor once. Yet, its bankruptcy has caught my interest because for the longest time in Thunder Bay we used to get our cable feed from Detroit (they then shifted away a few years ago to Minneapolis) and […]
A Digression on University Finance
Well, you may have caught Alex Usher’s HESA post this week on university finances. He presented data on university operating budgets from the CAUBO/Statistics Canada financial survey for the period 2007-08 to 2011-12 that shows that university budgets went up by 28 percent. This is quite intriguing because while universities maintain they have been having […]
Satisfaction
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. […]
Crime and Macroeconomics
The Banca D’Italia – Italy’s central bank – supports and promotes a wide range of research activity including quite a bit even in the area of economic history, which for an economic historian like myself is especially heart warming to see. The ongoing Euro Zone economic downturn and crisis naturally also spawns a lot of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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