On a hot evening in July I flew back home to Ottawa from Washington DC after having testified before The United States Senate Committee on Finance. But that was not the end of it. A few days later an email arrived with a list of questions. The Senators gave me homework!
Here is a quick snapshot of trade patterns between Canada and India, that may offer a bit of context given that the Canadian Prime Minister is currently in India.
Trade between the two countries is only a very small fraction of their overall exports: in 2009 total Canadian exports amounted to about $308 billion, but only about $2 billion went to India.
Continue reading “Trade between Canada and India is dominated by a few commodities”
Nate Silver is a pollster with a reputation, having correctly predicted the outcome of the 2008 American election in 49 of the 50 States. In 2012 he is giving the edge to President Obama over Governor Romney by a good margin.
There is a science to polling, and Mr. Silver knows it well enough to realize that it is not exact: all predictions come with a level of uncertainty.
But he figures that Mr. Obama has at least a 77% chance of winning the required 270 electoral college votes, even if at the same time he is predicting the President will only capture 52% of the popular vote.
The last time an incumbent sought re-election during the aftermath of a great recession was in 1936, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was challenged by the Republican Governor of Kansas, Alfred Landon.
At that time The Literary Digest magazine was the pollster to be reckoned with, having correctly predicted the winner in each presidential election since 1920, including Roosevelt’s 1932 victory.
Continue reading “Polling the pollsters suggests the odds favour Obama”
The labour market has fared better in Canada than in many other rich countries, it has fared better than it has in past recessions, but it has not fared as well as it could.
This is the major message from a recently released report by the Parliamentary Budget Office, which offers a valuable description of the Canadian jobs market because it puts developments in context: comparing them to underlying trends, comparing them to previous recessions, and comparing them to developments in other countries.
There has been virtually no growth in employment among young Canadians over the course of the last three years. Employment plummeted in late 2008 for those younger than 25, and has gone nowhere but sideways since . This is in sharp contrast for older groups: their employment levels recapturing all the recessionary losses by 2010.
Tavia Grant, a reporter with the Globe and Mail, offers a nice summary of a Statistics Canada report that describes recent economic developments in an article called “Older workers have the edge in the current recovery.” But a picture from the study by Cyndi Bloskie and Guy Gellaty tells this story most clearly.
Read the employment levels for 15 to 24 year olds in thousands off of the left scale, and that for those 25 and older off of the right scale. Between September 2008 and August 2009 employment among the young fell by a quarter of a million, and has been virtually stagnant since.
These patterns have been clear for some time, and in fact might be worse than the picture suggests because they do not even correct for the growth in the underlying population.
Inequality has increased in the majority of rich countries, but the share of income and earnings going to the top has increased most in the anglophone countries. McMaster University economist Mike Veall says Canada has not escaped this trend, and argues that a public policy response is needed.
The underlying causes of, in his words, “the surge” in the shares of the top 1%, one-tenth of 1% and even the top one-hundredth of 1% in Canada remain elusive. Even so these changes should motivate at least three policy responses that could be supported across the political spectrum.
Professor Veall was the 2012 president of the Canadian Economics Association, the professional association of economists based in Canada, and presented his presidential address at the annual meetings of the Association held last June at the University of Calgary.
Continue reading “Inequality and top income shares in Canada: Recent trends and policy implications”
Economics for public policy 