Category Canadian economy
The Bank of Canada vs the bond market
Carolyn Wilkins, Senior Deputy Governor at the Bank of Canada, gave a speech yesterday at noon. She said that the Bank of Canada had lowered its estimate of the (cyclically-adjusted) neutral rate of interest. "All told, we think that the neutral rate of interest is lower than it was in the years leading up to […]
Tax Competition
The Tax Foundation released its 2014 International Tax Competitiveness Index (ITCI) of 34 OECD countries and Canada’s overall rank was 24 out of 34 countries. Despite our recent snagging of Burger King, we are apparently in the bottom third of OECD countries when it comes to tax competitiveness. Interestingly enough, the United States did even […]
Balancing the Premiers
Apparently, ten out of ten premiers (13 out of 13 if we count the territories) can agree that Canada is suffering from a “fiscal imbalance” between Ottawa and the provinces. At their annual meetings, which are wrapping up in Charlottetown today, the provincial premiers are arguing that since the Federal budget is moving into surplus […]
Tim Hortons
A lot of US econobloggers are talking about the Tim Hortons-Burger King merger. But all they seem to talk about is corporate tax rates. I think they are missing the big picture. The big picture is here: [I can't figure out how to embed that picture in Typepad. That's okay, I did – SG] To […]
Physicians and Workload: A Very Simple International Comparison
The Canadian Medical Association has been having its annual meetings this week in Ottawa and in honor of the event, let me put out another international comparison on physicians using data from the OECD Health Statistics 2013. The first chart (Figure 1) is a basic resource availability measure showing the number of physicians per 1000 […]
Stewardship and Autonomy
Ontario last week announced the signing of Strategic Mandate Agreements with each of its 44 universities and colleges as part of a move to “drive system-wide objectives articulated by the Ministry’s Differentiation Policy Framework.” Essentially, in a restrained fiscal environment the provincial government prefers to target money for new programs only where they can be […]
Why has the Bank of Canada “done nothing” for 4 years?
On the face of it, the Bank of Canada has done absolutely nothing for nearly 4 years now, and most people think it won't do anything until sometime next year. The target of the overnight rate has stayed at 1% for a very long time. This is very puzzling. I do not understand it. But […]
A New Policy Think Tank
Well, there is a new policy think tank in Canada and they have just released a commentary on the minimum wage.
We Are Not Slower, Just More Erratic: Comparing Growth in Canada and the United States
The existence of a productivity gap between Canada and the United States should ultimately manifest itself in terms of the growth rate of real per capita GDP. If productivity growth in Canada is consistently below that of the United States, then our real per capita GDP should also not grow as quickly as the United […]
The Real Minimum Wage
I was a bit surprised that the recent upsurge in unemployment in Ontario in June, which was especially concentrated amongst youth (individuals aged 15 to 24 years), did not generate much discussion about the impact of the minimum wage. Ontario’s adult minimum wage rose 75 cents on June 1st to hit 11 dollars per hour. […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments