Category Canadian economy
Another productivity slowdown
Although employment growth continued to be respectable through 2006, output growth slowed – signifying yet another reduction in productivity growth: Statscan’s Philip Cross tries to figure out why (22-page pdf), paying special attention to sectoral and regional factors: Last year’s drop in mining productivity was part of a long-term downward trend. The declining productivity of […]
The fallacy of composition: Canadian economy edition
For some inexplicable reason, the Globe and Mail decides that valuable space should be devoted to the musings of a US-based consultant: Where would Canada be without sizzling Alberta? Stalled without it, U.S. economist says: Alberta’s sizzling economy is keeping all of Canada from burning out, reckons one U.S.-based economist. Carl Weinberg, chief economist at […]
Have we dodged a recession?
A couple of months ago, I was starting to get pessimistic: GDP shrank in September, and falling oil prices were eroding a trade surplus that consisted entirely of energy exports. Growth was zero in October; things weren’t looking good. But bad things didn’t continue to happen. StatsCan’s leading indicator index continued to rise. Building permits […]
The Alberta carfields
In his column in the Globe and Mail the other day, Jim Stanford worries about the arrival of a trade deficit in the auto sector: A new auto pact, for a new auto industry: The Globe and Mail’s Greg Keenan recently reported that Ford Canada — for the first time since 1961 — produced fewer […]
Labour market flexibility and interprovincial migration
The most important development in the Canadian economy over the past 5 years has been the 40% appreciation of the CAD-USD exchange rate since January 2002, largely due to the increase in the price of oil and other commodities. The effects have been predictable: booms in the mining and oil sectors, and hard times for […]
Canada’s Q3 GDP release: Not pretty, and likely to get uglier
We’ve had a run of decent numbers recently: employment and wage growth doing okay, and the current account surplus improved last quarter. But the Q3 GDP numbers don’t look good at all. It’s not that the quarterly growth rate itself – 1.7%, a bit shy of the 2% forecasters had been expecting – was so […]
When the minimum wage bites
The ‘old minimum wage research’ – summarised here – found that the effect of an increase in the minimum wage on employment was significant. The ‘new minimum wage research’ – à la Card and Krueger – found that the effect was not significant. When the idea of increasing the Quebec minimum wage to 10$/hr was […]
A good decision on income trusts
The federal Conservatives’ decision to eliminate income trusts has generated a certain amount of fuss (even The Economist noticed), especially in the form of sharply reduced share prices for companies that had structured themselves to take advantage of the tax breaks they provided. Much of the media coverage about the pros and cons of income […]
Collateral damage from the yuan peg
According to the Financial Times, US papers are looking to China for newsprint: The newsprint that will roll over the presses of the Orlando Sentinel some time next month may not look any different to the paper’s readers. But it will have endured a fairly tortuous journey – from a port in China, across the […]
Canada’s shrinking stock market
The Financial Times reports on a series of high-profile foreign takeovers of Canadian companies: This is getting serious: on current trends Céline Dion might be the only Canadian icon left. Many others are being picked off by foreigners. This year’s disappeared include Canada’s oldest corporation, the Hudson’s Bay Company; its two biggest nickel miners, Inco […]
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