Category Stephen Gordon
The corporate tax on workers and consumers
One of the NDP's lines on the budget – the very first words spoken by Jack Layton in his reaction during the CBC coverage – is to denounce the continuation of the corporate tax rate reductions that began under Jean Chrétien's government in 2000. (The basic rate was 28% in 2000, is at 18% now […]
Where did the unemployed manufacturing workers go?
I noted a couple of months ago that employment losses in the recession were generally concentrated in the goods-producing sector: some 350,000 jobs were lost there, and there's been little in the way of recovery. On the other hand, job losses in the services sector (about 3 times as large) were on the order of […]
A buying opportunity for snowbirds?
Casey Mulligan notes that "US houses during the boom did not look so expensive from a European perspective", although he's not sure to what extent it matters. I suspect that it matters a lot to many Canadians. Here's a graph of the Case-Shiller Phoenix house price index in USD and in CAD, along with the […]
Ex post and ex ante comparisons of the Canadian and US employment recessions
Today's LFS release was another piece of welcome news: some 38% of the losses in employment and in hours worked have been recovered. And I think it's time for those who predicted that Canada was not going to implode to take a bow.
What if price-level targeting were already in place?
A popular research topic at the Bank of Canada over the past few years has been price-level targeting: committing to a path for the level of core CPI, not just to its rate of inflation. The idea here is that standard inflation targeting forgets and forgives past deviations from target. But under price level targeting, […]
Economic nationalism is the last refuge of incompetent managers
At one point during the coverage of last Thursday's budget, Allan Gregg suggested that some of the measures – liberalizing the telecoms market, tariff cuts – would bring economic nationalism back to the public agenda (my immediate reaction). And today, Jeffrey Simpson is talking about the perils of the 'branch plant economy'.
When 5.0% GDP growth is better news than 5.9% GDP growth
In 2009Q4, US GDP grew by 5.9% at annual rates; the number was 5.0% in Canada. But our news was much better. Here is a graph of the contributions to GDP growth by expenditure category: US GDP growth would have been only 2.0% without the contribution of the inventory terms (which was itself a deceleration […]
Follow the yellow brick road to Ottawa
Here is my theory of Canadian federal politics. We are in Oz, and our political parties are the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion. The Conservatives are the Tin Man. Smart, courageous, but without a moral compass. The Liberals are the Cowardly Lion. Smart, principled, but without the conviction to defend an idea […]
Shaking the Booga-Wooga Stick that is NAFTA’s Chapter 11
In today’s Globe and Mail, Jim Stanford is upset at how the BC govt handled their teachers’ strike: legislation, fines, etc. This is of course a defensible and understandable position for someone who works for a union, but he lets his indignation get the better of him when he reaches for the NAFTA Chapter 11 […]
The unbearable lightness of being the US investment balance
Timothy Geithner of the New York Fed is worried about the US investment balance: Our trade deficit is now roughly the size of the current account deficit, and very large relative to our export base. And our net investment income balances are now likely to move into deficit. It matters because of the trajectory of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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