There is an interesting story in the Financial Post about a summit held in Fredericton recently on the topic of entrepreneurship. The title of the piece is “Can New Brunswick become the Davos of entrepreneurship?”. We have discussed the topic…
Continue ReadingA kind of moral hazard
KPMG is out with their tax competitiveness model (building on their operating cost model from earlier this year). You will find that Moncton and Fredericton are the lowest cost jurisdictions in the word (among the jurisdictions compared) for several industries…
Continue ReadingIt’s the Economy, Stupid and elections
My third post this morning – a little overkill but I had promised to write this one for someone who asked. Because we are heading into an election in the fall, I was asked if I endorse specific parties or…
Continue ReadingAcademic economic development: redux
I just wanted to follow up quickly on a few comments I received about my column yesterday. There does seem to be a pile of academic research in the area of community economic development but I make a big distinction…
Continue ReadingThere is nothing new under the sun
I have blogged several times over the years about the Lord government’s “report card to New Brunswickers” that I received in my mailbox one day. It was a masterpiece of statistical spin for political purposes – unrivalled in my opinion until…
Continue ReadingOwn the economic development podium
Someone sent me this very interesting article about Own the Podium and its implications for wider public policy. At its core, OTP had a “mandate to identify and develop those athletes with the most potential to succeed in the games.” …
Continue ReadingMeasuring the impact of economic development
I know a lot of economic developers don’t like talking about direct measurement because they, rightly, say there are too many broader environmental issues that impact economic development and that broader environment will skew the results (up or down) of…
Continue ReadingNB employment growth second slowest in Canada over past year
From the latest labour force survey out today. It’s the same story. The Canadian economy churns out 109,000 new jobs in the past month and NB churns out 800 of them. These are the year over year employment growth numbers…
Continue ReadingThe problem with real time
My rental car yesterday had satellite radio so I enjoyed a mix of CNBC, Bloomberg News and BBC News for the five hours I was driving around NB. In the middle of the afternoon I got a fascinating example of…
Continue ReadingGood looking project for NB
http://www.gnb.ca/cnb/news/bnb/2010e0673bn.htm This looks like a good project for NB but I have never heard of BNB using payroll rebates before. I can’t find any other references to it before. Is this new? What is the program about? What are the…
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