Category Nordic
Welfare states can be competitive
Jim Stanford sets aside our shared scepticism about the WEF competitiveness rankings to make two points in his column in today’s Globe and Mail: Get real about Canadian competitiveness: Nine of the 15 countries ahead of us on the WEF list collect higher taxes than Canada. Indeed, the Scandinavian welfare states cleaned up this year: […]
Federalism and the race to the bottom
Yesterday’s headline in the Globe and Mail provides a nice segue from my post on ethnic diversity and the Nordic model to how Canada’s federal structure could be a useful tool in generating the sort of public consensus that the Nordic model requires. Unfortunately for me, the source of the headline is somewhat problematic: Empower […]
Ethnic diversity and the Nordic model
There seems to be a consensus of opinion on the Nordic model around two points: It’s admirable. It can’t be exported to countries that aren’t as small and ethnically homogeneous as the Nordic countries. In a recent interview in the New Perspectives Quarterly (h/t to New Economist’s very helpful series on the Nordic model), Milton […]
The Irish exception
In some circles (such as on the pages of the National Post), whenever the virtues of the Nordic model are cited, a standard riposte is "What about Ireland?" Well, indeed. When I was putting together the graphs for this post, I found that Ireland was quite literally off the chart.
Nordic Canada: The tax mix
The ‘Nordic model’ has many admirers, and I’m one of them. It appears to have the best of both worlds: the wealth that markets provide best, combined with the social programs that governments provide best. As I noted earlier, there’s no obvious tradeoff between these two objectives: we can have both, if we want. For […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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