It’s a tongue in cheek reference, of course, but it is true that persons earning higher incomes pay far more taxes than those in the middle and lower end of the income distribution. And it is also true that the…
Continue ReadingNaRColepsy: An R&D sleep disorder that causes excessive sleepiness and frequent daytime sleep attacks
I find this story about the NRC strange. It seems like just yesterday the feds were talking about having the NRC centres at the centre of technology cluster development across Canada. Now, they are talking about pulling the plug…
Continue ReadingThe myth of scientific economic development
I can’t remember the city but there was a place in the US back in the 1990s that just decided one day to attract chocolate and candy manufacturers from Europe. The jurisdiction sent over delegations to Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, etc. and ended…
Continue ReadingRinse and repeat: Small business needs big business
Thought I would take another stab at this issue of the symbiotic relationship between the big biz and the small biz in a healthy economic ecosystem. It’s a mostly an argument I have been losing. From pundits to politicians…
Continue ReadingAre we headed for a show down at the O.K. Corral over EI?
I see my comrade at arms, Kurt Peacock, is strongly supporting the Mowat EI reform proposal that I blogged about yesterday. His justification is a straight forward economic one – remove the income support component of the EI program…
Continue ReadingMowat Centre and the EI system
The Mowat Centre has published a new report calling the current EI system unfair because the same worker in Saskatchewan has to work more weeks and will earn less total EI payments compared to someone in Newfoundland and Labrador. The…
Continue ReadingMillennials and economic development
By now I have a pretty good senses of my strengths and weaknesses – particularly when it comes to data analysis and interpretation. I can give you broad demographic stats on where the Millennials are living, their income, education…
Continue ReadingAccolades for education performance?
I see on the front page of the T&T Bernard Lord is being honoured for all his hard work in the area of education. A couple of years ago I was at an event where Premier McKenna was heralded for…
Continue ReadingCapacity to address the demographic tsunami
Not long after my column on the Economy Lab went live, I got an email asking me to explain the sentence “this region has far less capacity to address it than the rest of Canada.” As you can imagine, it…
Continue ReadingThe demographic tsunami
The following data provides a little insight into the demographic tsunami. I have tried to show this in different ways to illustrate the point. The first table shows the young and over 65 population age cohorts in 1971 and 2010.…
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