Category Canadian economy
Eliminating milk quotas: a thought experiment
There are three ways to reduce the price of a product. The first is through technological innovation – the reason why the price of computing power and memory storage is now so low. The second is to cut wages, or the price of other inputs. Even though the basic technology of sewing t-shirts has not […]
A Debt Interpretation of Canadian Confederation
The apparent success of Europe's leaders in dealing with the European economic crisis at their recent summit may mark the beginnings of a stronger fiscal union but exactly how this might be enforced is still a big question. The long term goal is to tie budgets, currencies and governments even more tightly together. However, without […]
The Canadian fiscal union: lessons for the eurozone?
Paul Krugman noted a few days ago that [A]s far as underlying economic inequalities are concerned, the EZ is no worse than the US. The difference, mainly, is that we think of ourselves as a nation, and blithely accept fiscal measures that routinely transfer large sums to the poorer states S.C. at The Economist's Free […]
Information and Empire
The case of the Parliamentary Budget Officer again locking horns with the federal government because of a request for information is symptomatic of a broader problem. The PBO is giving the government until the fall to release additional details of planned budget cuts or will take them to court. Naturally, in Ottawa’s current budgetary siege […]
Coming Soon to a University Near You…H-Index Rankings
Most of us are familiar with the metric known as the h-Index. Developed by Jorge Hirsch, the h-index is a measure that says that if you have an index of h, you have published h papers each of which has been cited at least h times.
Is the Health Care Cost Curve In Canada Finally Bending?
While public health care spending in Canada has been growing, what has not received a lot of attention is that after adjusting for inflation and population, growth rates of real per capita public health spending in Canada have actually been declining.
Competition between unions
Suppose you were a believer in the benefits of canoes. You want as many Canadians as possible to own a canoe. You would presumably want to encourage competition between different canoe manufacturers, so they would compete on price and quality, so that price would be lower and/or quality would be higher, so that more Canadians […]
New Limits, Same Issues
Well, nearly a year after the topic was discussed here on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, the Canadian government has loosened the rules on how much Canadian can bring back from the United States.
We Are Not Alone…
One more bit of quick evidence on manufacturing and its share of GDP – this time, international evidence. I found some data from the United Nations for the period 1970 to 2010 and calculated the manufacturing to GDP ratios for Canada, the other six G-7 countries as well as Brazil, China, India, Australia and also […]
The Decline of Manufacturing in Canada – 1926-2011: Dutch Disease?
The debate about “Dutch Disease” is focused on the relationship between natural resource export booms, currency appreciation and the decline of Canadian manufacturing. I decided it was worth hunting up some long-term data on manufacturing’s share of Canada's economy given that my economic history background tells me that over the long-term, the share of the […]
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