In a recent column in the Globe and Mail, Tom Flanagan bemoans the fact that the premium structure of Employment Insurance is not lined up with expected benefits. As a result, provinces to the west of the Ottawa River have long paid a good deal more into the program than they receive in benefits. The … Continue reading Employment Insurance reform doesn’t need consitutional change
Normally, I don’t venture into to predicting month-to-month changes in the unemployment rate, but this month is an exception for two reasons. The changes are certainly going to go well beyond the statistical noise inherent in the Statistics Canada survey, so there is no chance that the picture will be clouded. And history really isn’t … Continue reading Canada’s unemployment rate will likely double to 10%, and that’s an understatement
[ This post is a summary of a presentation called “Public insurance to promote social mobility” that I made to the “Social Mobility Summit” held at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC on January 13th, 2014. It is intended for an American readership, and is also posted in an abridged form on the Brookings website. … Continue reading Families need insurance for wages and for family responsibilities
Arthur Cecil Pigou made lasting contributions to the science of economics, but for macro-economists of a certain generation he will always be considered a laughingstock. Professor Pigou taught at Cambridge University during the first decades of the 1900s, and had the misfortune of making a cameo appearance in the opening chapters of what is arguably … Continue reading Mr. Keynes and the Austrians: a battle over a suggested interpretation of unemployment
At 8.1% the unemployment rate in the United States is about one percentage point above the 7.2% currently reported for Canada, but this gap would be almost two percentage points if the Canadian rate was measured in the same way as the American. This revealing picture from the recent Canadian federal government Budget paints a … Continue reading The gap between US and Canadian unemployment rates is bigger than it appears
It is the stated goal of the Canadian federal government to foster “a strong and inclusive labour market that provides every Canadian with opportunities for a good quality of life.” The legacy of COVID has, however, led to policy incoherence, with some significant reforms directly putting this goal into question.
Economics for public policy 