Category Stephen Gordon
Why increased immigration won’t fix population aging
A popular solution to the problem of population aging is to simply increase the rate at which we admit immigrants. This sounds reasonable: the age profile of new immigrants is generally younger than that of the existing population. But increased immigration can't do much more than make the problem slightly less bad. (See also this […]
A short history of population aging in Canada
I'm still playing around with demographic data, and one thing I've done is trace out a timeline of how we ended up having the population aging problem in the first place. I even prepared an animated gif file: a WCI first.
Population aging has begun in earnest
Last year, I blogged about the demographic projections that Statistics Canada had prepared in 2005, and I noted that data post-2005 were tracking the lower bound for the working-age share of the population. They've since released another set of projections starting in 2010, and things don't look any better. The sharp rise in the retirement-age […]
How not to evaluate immigration policy
The Fraser Institute has released a study on immigration policy, but there's not much point in telling you its conclusions: the questions they ask are not worth answering.
The 2011 election and Somebody Else’s Problem
In Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams posited the existence of 'SEPs': An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem…. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly […]
A preliminary estimate for Canadian 2011Q1 GDP growth
Statistics Canada released their estimates for monthly GDP growth in February: a decline of 0.2%. This is a disappointing number, but when combined with the strong January number and the increase in hours worked in March, my toy backcaster that uses the first two months' GDP data and the employment numbers in the third month […]
Tax choices in the OECD
The CBC's vote compass has attracted a certain amount of attention and not a small amount of controversy. I like these sorts of exercises, even if the questions aren't always well-posed. So here are some 'tax compasses'. I'm not going to even try to set up some sort of interactive questionnaire, because everyone's preferred tax […]
Why high gasoline prices are good news for Canada
Or at least, not the unremittingly bad news that they would appear to be from stories like this: Gas prices 'sucking energy' out of Canadian households: The long upward march in gas prices since late 2010, which has helped keep Canada's resource-based economy chugging, is also equivalent to a 7% hike on the income tax […]
Real wages, the recession that was, and the recession that wasn’t
After the tech bubble burst, the United States went into recession, but Canada did not. This isn't to say that we escaped entirely unscathed; there were some nervous moments, and the Bank of Canada saw fit to reduce its overnight rate target from 5.75% to 2.25% between January and November 2001. But if you look […]
The recovery picks up speed
Today's GDP numbers are a happy contrast to the sort of numbers we were seeing six months ago: Recent data from the US are also encouraging. The recession is over, and the end of the recovery is getting closer.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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