Category Canadian economy
Looking back on the expansion: This time, it’s different
The 2007Q1 national accounts numbers were released last week, and it looks like we have indeed dodged that slowdown we were worrying about last fall. And a good thing, too: compared to the 1982-90 and 1991-01 expansions, this current run has some very nice features. This is one of those long, data-oriented posts with lots […]
Homogamy, inequality and social mobility
A couple of recent studies by Statistics Canada on the phenomenon of ‘assortive marriage’ have generated some comment. The point is easy enough to explain and it’s not really hard to understand: Changing role of education in the marriage market in Canada and the United States: …54% of Canadian young couples had the same educational […]
From Ghawar to Athabaska
Jim Hamilton points us to Stuart Staniford’s analysis of the decline in oil production in Saudi Arabia’s most important oil field: After Stuart’s monumental research, I really think the burden of proof is on those who claim that Saudi Arabian production can continue to increase. At this point, we need not the conclusions of experts […]
Connecting profits and investment
Paul Krugman’s column on the apparent disconnect between high profits and low investment (as ever, the indispensable Mark Thoma provides the reference) has a bit of déjà vu for Canadian readers: haven’t we seen this before? But more fundamentally, I don’t see why we should expect that there should be a stable relationship between current […]
Foreigners are buying up Canadian assets. But that’s not the real story.
The spectre of economic nationalism has returned: foreigners are buying up Canadian-controlled firms. Oh my! Some reasons why we should still sleep soundly: – Foreign ownership is a good thing: ‘Foreign-controlled plants are more productive than domestic-controlled plants. Foreign-controlled plants and firms are also more innovative, more R&D intensive and use more advanced technologies.’ – […]
Real wages and productivity revisited
Andrew Jackson says: I’ve argued for years, with much of the left, that average worker pay has lagged productivity growth mainly because of the increased bargaining power of capital vis a vis labour due to “globalization”, attacks on unions etc etc. There’s another explanation. It turns out that the way real wages are measured – […]
Income distributions and Mandelbrot sets
Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Mike Veall at McMaster University have a paper (AER version; NBER version) on how the top end of the income distribution in Canada has evolved over time. (Saez has of course been involved with many other projects using US data.) Happily for me, they’ve posted what is now my favourite excel […]
Things we can see in a graph of not-seasonally-adjusted employment rates
Brad DeLong says that the NSA employment ratio is his favourite graph: [I]t shows, in one picture, the seasonal cycle, the business cycle, and the long-term trend in American labor force participation coming from demography and feminism. The same plot of Canadian data – with the US numbers as a benchmark – tells that story […]
Canada’s GDP growth rate fell yet again in 2006Q4. And it’s good news!
After the big revision in the US numbers for 2006Q4 GDP, Statistics Canada must be feeling pretty good about its policy to not produce preliminary estimates for GDP. Anyway, the headline number – an annualised GDP growth rate of 1.4% – is hardly encouraging. But look at the sources of growth: If the only drag […]
Canada’s exorbitant penalty
Canada’s current account surplus decreased by $C 5.3b in 2006Q4, thanks to a $C 4.5b deterioration of the income balance. The puzzle about the Canadian income balance is exactly the opposite of the one posed by the US balance. We’ve been running a healthy current account surplus for 6 years now, and the net international […]
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