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For resource value, reject the helicopter model

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011

May. 30, 2011
Natural resources are increasingly central to Canada’s economic trajectory. Our challenge is to maximize the positive spinoffs from resource developments, while minimizing the economic and environmental costs…. The Roil report is a careful and thoughtful attempt to come to grips with concrete challenges associated with Canada’s growing reliance on globalized resource sectors. It should be studied by policy-makers in all provinces.

Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, standard of living
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The end of poverty: What globalization did that AID could not

Monday, May 30th, 2011

May 28, 2011
… we have just lived through the most dramatic decrease in global poverty in history. And the transformation has almost nothing to do with debt relief or higher aid flows. According to the Brookings report, Poverty in Numbers: The Changing State of Global Poverty from 2005 to 2015, we are living in a period of rapid global poverty reduction that is driven by high, sustained economic growth across the developing world.

Tags: economy, globalization, standard of living
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Better life through higher income

Friday, May 27th, 2011

May 25, 2011
… a slick presentation can overcome even the dodgiest substance and if you go towww.betterlifeindex.org, you find a really slick presentation. Click on “My Better Life Index” and you’re met with 34 daisies, one for each OECD country. Each daisy has 11 petals, indicating the country’s performance on a scale of one to 10 on 11 different measures of well-being (income, health, employment, work-life balance, and so on). You can ask for a ranking on each of the petals, in which case, as if blown by a summer breeze, the daisies dance around to reconfigure themselves in order by that variable.

Tags: economy, ideology, standard of living
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Newfoundland has a lesson for Canada on globalization

Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

May 20, 2011
Vale’s “home country” has few regulations, weak enforcement of those regulations and negligible labour rights. The concept of stakeholders does not exist in its strategic decision-making. What Vale chooses to do, Vale does… In contrast, Canada’s institutions, regulations and laws were built on an approach that seeks to balance rights and responsibilities, from the most powerful to the most vulnerable… The Vale example is a wake-up call: We can let globalization shape us, or we can shape globalization.

Tags: economy, globalization, ideology
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Socialized medicine is good for B.C. business

Thursday, May 5th, 2011

May 4, 2011
… according to international research, B.C. is a better choice for enterprise than Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other commercial centres, in part because of its public health care system. Yet in the past decade, it has been B.C.’s chief rivals such as Ontario that have capitalized on medicare. Ontario’s economic development agency highlights how the province’s health care system reduces operating costs… Even with its current challenges, “socialized medicine” proves to be far more cost-efficient and reliable and provides better quality care than private, for-profit health care.

Tags: economy, globalization, Health, ideology, standard of living
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Harper and the illusion of economic management

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

May 01 2011
… the Conservatives… are putting forward the same market fundamentalist policies that have taken countries time and again to the brink of economic disaster: • Tax cuts that will benefit the wealthiest and boost corporations’ bottom lines, but do nothing to spur investment in manufacturing or increase the growth of full-time jobs. • “Cost efficiency savings” that will mean the roughly 80,000 federal public sector workers… will not be replaced… • “Smaller government” that will mean fewer public services and that Canada will continue to have one of the worst records of rising inequality and poverty…

Tags: budget, economy, globalization, ideology, standard of living
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The campaign’s top corporate tax myths

Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

Apr 25, 2011
Our election banter reminds me of the 1960s, with populist views that corporations only benefit the rich and powerful and should therefore be taxed to the hilt. The many myths about corporate tax policies being propagated are deplorable… Putting together all the benefits and costs associated with corporate tax rate reductions, there is no question that moving to the 15% federal rate is good public policy.

Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, standard of living, tax
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An ailing Ireland’s lessons for Canada

Saturday, April 23rd, 2011

Apr 23 2011
Economists are loath to attempt to measure the job-creation impact of corporate tax rates. Common sense tells you there can’t be much of a connection between the two if Germany, by far the healthiest European economy, imposes a rate of 30 per cent to Ireland’s 12.5 per cent. There are simply too many factors guiding business decisions to suss out the influence of federal tax rates on corporate profits. And Ireland is a prime example.

Tags: economy, globalization, ideology, tax
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Corporate taxes: to cut or not to cut?

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

Apr. 18, 2011
In just five years, Canada has gone from having the highest business taxes in the Group of Seven industrialized nations to the lowest. The federal corporate tax rate is on a course to reach 15 per cent next year, down from 28 per cent at the start of the decade – the result of successive cuts by both Liberal and Conservative governments… Most provinces have matched those breaks, saving businesses billions of dollars a year. But in the wrenching aftermath of the financial crisis and massive corporate bailouts, has the global rush to relieve the tax burden on businesses gone too far?

Tags: budget, economy, ideology, poverty, standard of living, tax
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Walking the line on corporate tax cuts

Friday, April 15th, 2011

Apr. 15, 2011
… what really counts is being competitive – which is what the Canadian rate would be wherever it stands in the 15-per-cent to 18-per-cent range… Parties, like provincial governments, are kidding themselves and, by extension, their electorates. Play with corporate rates all they like, governments are going to need more, not less, money to deal with an aging population. These costs – $2-billion to $3-billion a year for health care alone – will dwarf all the effects of corporate tax adjustments.