The World Economic Outlook – all 297 pages of it – is out. Here is the paragraph on Canada: The Canadian economy continues to perform robustly, benefiting from its strong macroeconomic policy framework and the boom in global commodity prices. The main risks to the outlook are external, including the possibility of a sharper-than-expected slowing […]
…and why we should start worrying that it may not be falling fast enough. Here is a plot of the labour’s share of national income in the US: This ratio is countercyclical (profits are more volatile than wages), and although its range of variation is large enough to dominate the secular trend, the trend is […]
The Conservatives’ promise to reduce the GST to 6% put economists once again in the painful position of witnessing economic sensibility being sacrificed for electoral gain. ‘Why’, we asked ourselves, ‘is bad economics good politics?’ Maybe it isn’t. From this morning’s Globe and Mail: Voters cool to GST cut, Tories warned: The GST cut at […]
So here I am in the corridor at the NDP convention. For some reason, the network to which I’m connected doesn’t reach into the main room itself, so this will have to do. I’ll be updating this post as the day goes on.
The New Democratic Party of Canada is holding their biennial convention here in Quebec City this weekend. In the last election, the NDP made some impressive strides in its quest to gain credibility in economic matters, so I’ve decided to attend as an observer in order to see if they stay on track. My first […]
There seems to be little doubt that beliefs about a US slowdown were sharply revised over the summer. Here are the US and Canadian yield curves for March, June and September: And here are the interest rate differentials: Perhaps the CAD hasn’t yet finished appreciating against the USD.
It means a lot to be able to say that, so I was very pleased to see this editorial in the Globe this morning: The first in the door: It’s not a massive expenditure, but the symbolism is important. Ontario has announced that it will spend $5-million on its program to promote higher education among […]
When I was a graduate student, I was given to understand that the reason why so many Canadian economists worked with American data was that US-based journals weren’t interested in publishing work done using non-US data. This impression was of course completely wrong. If anything, US journals (and their referees!) seem to have a prejudice […]
The Berkeley Electronic Press has a new journal: Basic Income Studies. The Basic Income – also known as the Guaranteed Annual Income (GAI) in Canada – is a proposal that I’m very much favourably disposed to, even though I’m not familiar with all of the technical details. I took a look at its inaugural issue, […]
I noted earlier that average tax rates in Canada are an approximately constant fraction of income. What about marginal income tax rates (MITRs)?
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