Category Livio Di Matteo
Game of Premiers: The Premiers, Health & Public Policy
Well, Canada’s premiers and territorial leaders are gathering in Halifax this week engaged in their version of the Game of Thrones with hurt feelings and fiscal uncertainty rather than beheadings, swordplay and pillaging the most likely dire consequences. Among the issues planned for discussion are energy and health care. Not on the official agenda will […]
Growth and Development: The Very Long Run
Well, though still on the road, I’m back in Canada after a conference trip to South Africa where I was part of a session on the analysis of late nineteenth/early twentieth century wealth in Britain and its Dominions using probate records. For a summary of my trip, click here. There was a multitude of interesting […]
A Debt Interpretation of Canadian Confederation
The apparent success of Europe's leaders in dealing with the European economic crisis at their recent summit may mark the beginnings of a stronger fiscal union but exactly how this might be enforced is still a big question. The long term goal is to tie budgets, currencies and governments even more tightly together. However, without […]
Information and Empire
The case of the Parliamentary Budget Officer again locking horns with the federal government because of a request for information is symptomatic of a broader problem. The PBO is giving the government until the fall to release additional details of planned budget cuts or will take them to court. Naturally, in Ottawa’s current budgetary siege […]
Coming Soon to a University Near You…H-Index Rankings
Most of us are familiar with the metric known as the h-Index. Developed by Jorge Hirsch, the h-index is a measure that says that if you have an index of h, you have published h papers each of which has been cited at least h times.
Is the Health Care Cost Curve In Canada Finally Bending?
While public health care spending in Canada has been growing, what has not received a lot of attention is that after adjusting for inflation and population, growth rates of real per capita public health spending in Canada have actually been declining.
New Limits, Same Issues
Well, nearly a year after the topic was discussed here on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, the Canadian government has loosened the rules on how much Canadian can bring back from the United States.
We Are Not Alone…
One more bit of quick evidence on manufacturing and its share of GDP – this time, international evidence. I found some data from the United Nations for the period 1970 to 2010 and calculated the manufacturing to GDP ratios for Canada, the other six G-7 countries as well as Brazil, China, India, Australia and also […]
The Decline of Manufacturing in Canada – 1926-2011: Dutch Disease?
The debate about “Dutch Disease” is focused on the relationship between natural resource export booms, currency appreciation and the decline of Canadian manufacturing. I decided it was worth hunting up some long-term data on manufacturing’s share of Canada's economy given that my economic history background tells me that over the long-term, the share of the […]
Meetings with Meaning
As we all head into academic conference season, here is some food for thought with a guest post by Steve Morgan. Enjoy. Livio.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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