Tag Archives: government

Public Debt: A Global Perspective

There is much international preoccupation with debt at the public sector, household and corporate levels and the upward creep in interest rates does apparently keep central bankers – including our own Mr. Poloz – awake at night.  Given the problem is an international one, sometimes it is useful to try and get a global perspective […]

The Economic Role of Monarchy

In the wake of the abdication of King Juan Carlos of Spain, the New York Times ran a short piece on monarchies noting that 12 monarchies still survive in Europe with eight of them being liberal democracies – Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Sweden.  Incidentally, these Scandinavian monarchies in particular are […]

A Brief Retrospective on the Public Sector

What better way to mark the eve of the Canadian Civic Holiday weekend than with a quick civically engaged overview of the growth of the public sector from a historical perspective.  In his 2011 Governments versus Markets: The Changing Economic Role of the State, Vito Tanzi provides a table on general government expenditures as a […]

The National Dream’s Economic Legacy

The completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) in 1885 was more than an impressive engineering achievement; it was also a significant joint economic undertaking by the public and the private sectors and a key ingredient in Canadian nation building as it provided the east-west transport corridor that made the Canadian west an investment frontier.  […]