Category Canadian economy
Why Is Manufacturing Special?
Andrew Coyne has an excellent piece in the National Post dealing with why there are no good reasons for corporate handouts in the wake of yet another round of assistance to the automobile sector. He asks what the economic rationale for this assistance is – that is, what is the economic value? He argues that […]
Did inflation targeting make inflation stickier?
I think my last post was very clear. Inflation targeting failed. I know this post won't be clear. But this post tries to answer the question that my last post begs to be answered. Why did inflation targeting fail? I used to think that if the Bank of Canada succeeded in keeping inflation on target, […]
The Bank of Canada’s success and failure
The Bank of Canada has been very successful in keeping inflation on target. Which is what the Bank of Canada was supposed to do. But keeping inflation on target has failed to prevent recessions caused by deficient aggregate demand. Which is what keeping inflation on target was supposed to do. The problem is not the […]
The Year Ahead
The New Year is when we try to look ahead and project what we think the economy will be like. There is no shortage of forecasts from banks, international economic agencies and independent forecasters as to how the Canadian, US and world economies will fare over the next year.
Canadian Exceptionalism in Compensation
The Parliamentary Budget Office's most recent release "The Fiscal Impact of Federal Personnel Expenses: Trends and Developments" provides some interesting statistics on the amounts of employee compensation paid by Canada’s federal government. According to the report: “in 2011-12, Canada’s federal personnel expenses were $43.8 B, or 2.55 per cent of GDP. These expenses supported a […]
Mark Carney and NGDPLPT
Mark Carney said: "If yet further stimulus were required, the policy framework itself would likely have to be changed.19 For example, adopting a nominal GDP (NGDP)-level target could in many respects be more powerful than employing thresholds under flexible inflation targeting. This is because doing so would add “history dependence” to monetary policy. Under NGDP […]
As the World Turns
Several posts ago, I presented some numbers by Angus Maddison on the evolution of global GDP output shares over the period 1500 to 2001 which showed that Asia’s share of world GDP declined from 1500 to about the mid 20th century but has since been rising. I decided to try and do a bit of […]
Resource Revenue Retention: New Twists on an Old Idea?
In a post on iPolitics, author and journalist Madelaine Drohan discusses the move by the PQ government in Quebec to embrace the Generations Fund – a sovereign wealth fund created by the Liberal government of Jean Charest in 2006. The original plan was to invest water power and mining royalties into a fund whose income […]
$600b debt x (2% inflation + 2.5% real growth) = $27b
Just a little bit of simple debt and deficit arithmetic. Let's adjust the deficit for long run inflation and long run real growth. That cuts the deficit by around $27 billion.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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