Category Canada – Politics
Fewer Fiscal Multipliers and more Clarity from the Bank of Canada
At the risk of being thought "cavalier", I don't like what Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz is reported as saying by Kevin Carmichael. Inflation targeting is supposed to be inflation forecast targeting. The Bank of Canada is supposed to do what is needed to ensure that its own internal forecast of future inflation (at […]
On Central Bank Lending to Government
The central bank prints money, lends it to the government, and the government sooner or later spends it (or uses it to cut taxes or increase transfer payments). There seem to me to be two views on this question that are equally daft: The Orthodox Daft View: "Central bank lending to government is a Bad […]
Two Problems with Designing a Basic Income Experiment
WARNING: I don't do (micro) Public Finance. And I don't do experimental economics. Those who have read the literature may tell me they are well aware of these problems, or that I'm wrong about something. Suppose someone asked me to design an experiment to test whether Basic Income would be a Good thing. (They wouldn't […]
How Vancouver Escaped the Freeway Curse
In the 1950s, Vancouver began to feel the pain of traffic congestion. The travel time contour map below, taken from the 1958 study Freeways With Rapid Transit, shows how bad it was. In rush hour it took a 15 minutes or less to get from corner of Georgia and Granville to anywhere in the dark green area – […]
Importing people is not like importing apples
Remember all the old Canadian nationalists? The ones who said that the (Canada-US) Free Trade Agreement would destroy Canadian culture? The ones we economists defeated back in the 1988 election? I'm beginning to wish we hadn't defeated them quite so thoroughly. They were wrong. But they sorta, kinda, did have a point. Social/economic institutions are […]
Temporary vs permanent fiscal policy in a small open inflation targeting economy
Just a short note as a backgrounder for the current Canadian debate about fiscal policy. This is totally unoriginal boring textbook stuff (at least I hope it is, anyway). Prerequisite: intermediate macro (or special permission to skip to the results if you promise not to ask me daft questions about where they came from). The […]
Old Keynesian vs New Keynesian fiscal policy
Mostly for non-macroeconomists. I first learned macroeconomics in the very early 1970's in the UK. I learned that the macroeconomy was not automatically self-equilibrating, and that the government should use fiscal policy to target "full employment" (aka "potential output"). The government should loosen fiscal policy when the economy was below potential and tighten fiscal policy […]
Keynes just left Canada
Paul Kugman's post title is "Keynes comes to Canada". Paul is wrong. Keynes was in Canada, but he just left. Look at this graph from Matthew Klein (a very good article, by the way): The other bit of information you need to know is that the Bank of Canada hit the Zero Lower Bound in […]
Twitter and the Federal Election: A Last Update
Well, there is just over a week to go until Canada’s federal election and I finally managed to put together another update of the leader Twitter follower numbers I first began looking at with my August 13th post and then August 29th and September 19th. It has been a long election campaign and the final […]
Another Update: Twitter and the Federal Election
Well, the federal election Leader's debate on Thursday evening was in the end a rather disappointing affair. It was essentially a series of thrusts, parries and spins on taxation, housing, immigration, energy, etc…but left out in the entire debate was any fundamental recognition of what I think is a major issue facing the future prosperity […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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