Category Canadian economy
The Bank of Canada will not raise interest rates tomorrow
When the Bank raised the overnight rate target by 25 basis points to 4.25% on May 24, it seemed to be for the last time (after seven such raises since last September), barring a significant change in the data: BoC Press release: …[T]he target for the overnight rate is now at a level that is […]
Canada’s dark anti-matter
The IMF released its annual report on the Canadian economy the other day. Nothing very much to report, which is understandable: the economy is operating at capacity, inflation is low and stable, and the government has been running a surplus for almost a decade now. There was an interesting tidbit in their forecasts: thanks to […]
Average and median earnings
Daniel Gross’ NYT column (h/t to New Economist) makes the oft-repeated point that an increase in average incomes doesn’t necessarily mean that most people are better off; it could also mean that the distribution of incomes is getting more unequal. Canada’s been seeing some positive employment and wage data, recently. But is it just a […]
Tâtonnement in the market for immigrants
Today, Greg Mankiw quotes from Larry Lindsey: Unlike some nations–Canada, for example–we do not "sell" residency to people who promise to bring in investment money and create jobs. As economists would say, if you’re not going to ration by price, you’re going to ration by queue. and asks: Why not ration by price? As noted […]
Canada’s manufacturing sector does not have Dutch disease
Thanks largely to increases in the value of oil exports, the Canadian dollar has appreciated by 40% against the USD since the beginning of 2002. So you’d think that our manufacturing sector would be getting hammered, right? After all, that’s the classic Dutch disease scenario: the high demand for natural resource exports drives up the […]
Encouraging news on income and wages
From today’s StatsCan Daily: Canadian families with two or more people had an estimated median income after taxes of $54,100 [in 2004], up about 2% from 2003 in real terms after adjusting for inflation. and Statistics Canada’s low-income rate measures the percentage of families below the low-income cutoff (LICO). The LICO is a statistical measure […]
Can’t win for losing
A couple of weeks ago, we learned that Canada had a near-record $9.3b current account surplus in 2005Q3. Today, Statistics Canada announced that the net investment position deteriorated by $17b over the same period. The reason, of course, is the continuing rise of the CAD: The value of international assets fell to $1,001.1 billion, a […]
We made the front page of The Economist!
This never happens. Do you think that they’ll start regularly including Canadian data in their cross-country comparisons? Nah. Too much to hope for.
Breaking news: Canada’s current account balance hits near-record levels!
What with the fall of the federal govt last night and the upcoming election, I’m pretty sure that few paid much attention to today’s StatsCan Daily. That’s too bad, because there was some interesting stuff there – and of far more importance than the tsunami of polls and election speculation that dominated today’s media headlines. […]
Convergence in Canada
In a previous post, I was sceptical of a claim made by the Globe’s Murray Campbell to the effect that the policy of redistributing from ‘have’ to ‘have-not’ provinces hasn’t worked. I’ve spent some time looking at the data, and one mystery has been cleared up: Ontario’s nominal GDP per capita was indeed 103% of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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