Category Livio Di Matteo
Taxation and Economic Growth
I had a bit of an intellectual crisis this evening as I pondered the conventional wisdom in economics regarding the choice between reducing consumption taxes or income taxes. Briefly put, the simple conventional wisdom is that taxes on consumption are preferred to income taxes because they encourage saving and long-term capital formation and economic growth. […]
Debt and Growth
As you probably all know, the Reinhart-Rogoff 2010 study found economic growth slows when the debt to GDP ratio exceeds 90 percent. They used data for 44 countries over a 200-year period and found the relationship between debt and real GDP growth was weak for debt to GDP ratios below 90 percent. However, above 90 […]
Montreal: An Island of Calm?
The latest release on the value of building permits for Canada's CMAs by Statistics Canada provides an interesting perspective on a slowing economy. The numbers show that there has been a downward trend in the total value of permits since late 2012.
Diagnosing Hospitals
CBC’s Fifth Estate has put together a ranking of Canadian hospitals and the results are out. They provide a new online tool that grades hospitals on key performance indicators reported by hospitals and justify it as a call for more accountability and transparency in the Canadian health care system. Given the inevitable complexity of ranking […]
Who Gets What Federalism
The recent Mowat Centre report on Ontario’s fiscal gap with Ottawa and the lament that Ontario puts more into Confederation than it gets out brought to mind a poll done in 2005 by EKOS that showed that 51 percent of Canadians believed their province was putting more money into Confederation than it gets out. Of […]
Minding the Gap
The Mowat Centre has issued a new report on Ontario’s fiscal balance within the Federation called "Filling the Gap: Measuring Ontario's Balance within the Federation." The report finds that: “based on the latest available figures, Ontarians transfer approximately $11B on net to the rest of Canada. This transfer is equivalent to 1.9% of the province’s […]
Good Luck Balancing the Federal Budget by 2015-16
Budgets are political and aspirational documents as they lay out a future course for the economy and government revenues and expenditures much as the government of the day would like them to be. Well, the 2013 federal budget is no exception as a bit of additional study of the budget numbers suggests that balancing the […]
Crime and Police
Statistics Canada has released its most recent report on police personnel and expenditures and notes that police strength measured as officers per capita declined in 2012 by 1 percent. Moreover, there has been a slight decline in police expenditures overall with spending in 2011 totaling 12.9 billion – a decline of 0.7 percent from the […]
Federal Budget Forecasting
What a difference just a few months can make in the world of federal government finance. Apparently, weak commodity prices and a slowing economy are playing such havoc with government finances that Thursday’s federal budget will show a downward revision of economic growth forecasts as well as a shortfall in revenue that will be addressed […]
Measuring Popes
With the Conclave of Cardinals about to convene to choose a successor to Benedict XVI, it is worth taking a look at some statistics regarding the line of popes over the course of 2000 years. Based on the list in the Catholic Encyclopedia, Benedict XVI was the 267th pope in a line stretching back to […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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