Canada has now almost eliminated inflation, but it is still struggling with a slow productivity growth, high and persistent unemployment, and large fiscal and external deficits. This essay reviews the identifiables causes and consequences of this evolution, and draws a number of lessons for the...

We use the returns on a set of international financial securities to identify exogenous shocks to the Canadian federal surplus. We find that a large portion of the variation in the surplus can be replicated by a linear combination of these returns and that the rising debt observed in the 1980s...

This paper examines the role of wage indexation and indexation lags in stabilization programs. We analyze whether the added inflation inertia caused by such lags increases the importance of the heterodox aspects of anti-inflation stabilization programs, which involve the imposition of direct...

The return to sound fiscal policy after the high budget deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s has been hailed by many as the Clinton administration's most important achievement. In this article, we evaluate post-war, US fiscal policy using an extension of Barro's (1979) tax-smoothing model,...

Under current projections of economic growth and fiscal policy for the next two years, the probability that the federal government will achieve its stated goal of bringing down the fiscal deficit to 3 per cent of GDP by 1996 is almost zero. Four types of changes could improve the odds that the...