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.…
Continue ReadingThe ‘spectre’ of paying as much tax as others
There is an article in the TJ this morning discussing the possibility of tax rises. We have been over this a dozen times but I will restate my position that New Brunswick should strive to have tax rates in line…
Continue ReadingBefore and after tax household income spreads in NB (Census)
Typical me, typical me Typical me I started something …And now I’m not too sure -Morrissey Just a quick follow up to a Tweet earlier today where I stated that I would like to see some folks in rural NB…
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