Category Livio Di Matteo
A Long Term Employment Picture – Go West for Opportunity
Stephen Gordon’s posts on the recent employment performance in Quebec gave me cause to get the numbers on employment growth over the long term on a provincial basis. I obtained the seasonally adjusted Statistics Canada employment numbers and used them to construct average annual growth rates in employment by province for three periods: 2001-2011, 1991-2000 […]
The Gambling Economy: A Zero Sum Game?
Two stories in the Toronto Star this week have left me wondering if there is a new grand strategy at work for transforming Ontario’s economy in the wake of its manufacturing decline.
Are Panic and Posturing Good Ways to Reduce the Deficit?
The Ontario government’s final approach to deficit reduction has begun with selected leaks of economist Don Drummond’s “first draft” of his review via media interviews designed to combine deficit reduction with high drama. A column by Martin Regg Cohn of the Toronto Star titled “Brace for a firestorm across Ontario” outlines cuts as high as […]
Does Dwight Duncan Believe in Magic?
Ontario is Canada’s largest province and befitting its status as the Queen of Confederation, now has the largest provincial debt and deficit in the country. In dealing with the provincial fiscal situation, much rests on the program spending review being conducted by economist Don Drummond. Due to be delivered by the end of January, it […]
Rendering More Unto Caesar
Given that the Christmas season is associated with giving, rendering unto Caesar is a suitable blog topic even if it is compulsory rather than voluntary giving.
Italian Public Finance
It is odd how ideas, thought and reading evolve over the course of a day. I started off early this morning reading Nick Rowe’s post on structural deficits in the Eurozone and assorted news stories on the European crisis. I then began working in my office and while shuffling a few books on my desk […]
Capital Formation in Canada: The Sequel
I decided to do a bit more work with my Canadian gross-fixed capital formation series for the period 1870 to 2010 to see if I could estimate a simple regression model that might explain its fluctuations. If everything can be explained by a few simple economic variables, then the downward trend in the ratio since […]
Canada’s Evolving Investment-Output Ratio
A phone discussion with a reporter this week on trends in Canadian investment and capital formation piqued my curiosity as to what the long-term trends in Canadian gross fixed capital formation have been. Apparently, despite the global financial crisis and associated economic uncertainty, business investment and capital formation is still relatively strong at the moment […]
Provincial Government Health Spending: The Equity Dimension
The meeting of the federal and provincial/territorial health ministers in Halifax on Thursday will be preoccupied with the sustainability of health expenditures and the coming negotiations over the renewal of the health care accord. Naturally, the provinces want to ensure that federal transfers continue to rise to meet their needs while the federal government will […]
Politics and Taxes
I wanted to weigh in on Stephen Gordon’s post on the Ontario HST reduction but found my entry in the comment box growing so here is a post instead. Why are the Conservatives and more to the point the NDP supporting what seems like a redistribution to higher incomes? Well, I think it comes down […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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