Category Livio Di Matteo
Alberta Juggernaut Continues…For Now
Friday’s Labor Force Survey release showed total employment and the unemployment rate were little changed and that there has been little overall employment growth in Canada since August. Indeed, total employment shrank slightly in Canada with Quebec and British Columbia faring the worst in terms of the total number of jobs lost. Of course, Alberta […]
US Budget 2015: Some Quick Thoughts
The Budget of the U.S. Government for the 2015 fiscal year was presented at the White House today and unlike Canada, we are not looking at a balanced budget by 2015. Indeed, the forecast is for a small decline in the deficit but the rest of the decade looks like deficits all the way down. […]
Should Municipalities in Canada Get More Money?
In the tradition of the fur traders of the Northwest Company, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities is holding their board meeting “Rendezvous” at the head of the Great Lakes in Thunder Bay from March 5th to 8th. It was difficult task trying to find an agenda on their website but no doubt they will be […]
Russia or China – Who Should the US Worry More About?
Developments in Crimea have shifted international attention to Russia in a manner we have not seen since the end of the Cold War. Recent years have seen an American preoccupation with the rise of China rather than Russia as a world economic and military power but the question remains – which one might be the […]
Missing the Target in Canada
Target’s retail invasion of Canada seems to have developed parallels to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia – it is fighting a losing battle in a cold winter. Target’s northern front lost 941 million dollars in 2013. A CBC news story reports that: “That expansion has been hammered by supply issues, as there are frequent reports of […]
Taxation and Growth: A North American Cross-Border Comparison
My last comparison of U.S. states and Canadian provinces with respect to their federal transfer revenue shares got me thinking about the other revenue sources and whether any relationship could be found between economic growth and revenue composition. Income taxation is supposed to have incentive and distortion effects on saving, risk taking and labor supply […]
Fiscal Federalism: A Cross-Border Comparison
As a federal country, one of Canada’s hallmarks is a well-developed system of intergovernmental transfers. Indeed, we often remark that Canadian provinces are dependent on federal transfers for large chunks of their spending and there is some debate over whether Canada’s provinces should engage in more own-source revenue effort rather than plead for more transfers. […]
International Employment Update: U.S. Resilience and Australian Exceptionalism
I thought it was time for an updated look at employment creation in the advanced economies given that we are now at just over five years since the 2008-09 Great Recession that walloped world economies. I’ve taken the IMF World Economic Outlook Database employment numbers for the period 2007 to 2013 to get employment levels […]
Visioning the Surplus
The Federal government is poised to move into a period of fiscal surplus. According to the 2014 Federal Budget, the 2014-15 fiscal year will see a 2.9 billion dollar deficit (which could actually be a small surplus due to the 3 billion dollar contingency fund). After that, 2015-16 will see a 6.4 billion dollar surplus […]
The 2014 Federal Budget
With so much commentary out there on the 2014 Federal Budget, there is probably not much left to contribute but here are a couple of thoughts.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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