Category Stephen Gordon
A new Canadian economics blog: Northern Economist
The string of good Canadian econoblog news continues. Lakehead University's Livio Di Matteo has a blog: Northern Economist. I've only become recently aware of it, but a brief skim is enough to tell me (and you) that this is yet another high-quality addition to the still-too-small Canadian econoblogosphere. I'm off to subscribe to his feed […]
How economic policy analysis is done, and why it’s not the same as forecasting
Third-year students in Laval's Baccalauréat intégré en économie et politique are required to take a seminar course on policy evaluation, and this week, I'm going to be giving a lecture on the basics of how it's done. It occurs to me that this is a lecture that many, many people should sit in on, so […]
The GST and Lord Voldemort
I can't – and won't – count the times where I've pointed out that increasing the GST is probably the best way of raising revenues to deal with a federal structural deficit whose size is almost exactly equal to the revenues foregone by the 2 points the Conservatives cut from the GST. And I have […]
Some corporate tax talking points I wish people would stop talking about
The issue of corporate taxes is becoming an issue, and it may even be an issue that provokes an election. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the debate has deteriorated even faster than I had feared. Here are five Bad Talking Points that I wish people would stop talking about.
A new Canadian economics blog!
Andrew Leach is an environmental economist at the University of Alberta, and he has started a blog: Rescuing the frog. I have just subscribed to his feed, and you should, too.
Tracking the Bank of Canada’s forecasts during the recession
Globe and Mail journalist Jeremy Torobin called me a while back to talk about Bank of Canada forecasts for this article, and that call prompted me to go back and look at how the Bank's forecasts evolved during the recession.
Cyclical productivity growth and the manufacturing sector
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. Here is a quick graph from FRED of US economy-wide vs manufacturing employment growth: One of the questions that I've had is whether the more rapid productivity growth in aggregate was the result of (a) faster productivity growth across lots of sectors, or (b) concentrating […]
International comparisons of construction employment in the recession
Many participants in the ongoing discussion ([1], [2], [3], [4], [5], etc) on international comparisons of the evolution of output and employment have raised the point that construction employment has played a more prominent role than usual in the most recent recession. I've put together a few graphs that may be useful. I'd also like […]
The federal budget: Austerity or stimulus or neither?
This year's federal budget is going to be an interesting one. A two-year stimulus package was introduced in 2009, which meant that the 2010 budget didn't have much to say. But now some decisions will have to be made. Should the government extend the fiscal stimulus? Follow the United Kingdom's example and embark on an […]
More evidence on minimum wages, employment and poverty: a continuing series
A couple of months ago, I brought attention to recent work in Quebec on just who is affected by the minimum wage. An important result was that the proportion of minimum wage earners who were in poverty (13.5%) was almost exactly the same as it is for the incidence of poverty in the general population […]
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