This paper provides my unique perspective as the economist on the team responsible for preparing the Liberal Party of Canada party platform for the 1993 election. This so-called 1993 Red Book was one of the first “contract with the public” political platforms. While not all the promises in...

This paper highlights the findings of some of the recent research on capital flows, credit booms, and their attendant consequences for asset prices, business cycles, financial crises and the interaction among these. The aim is to condense key results from the relevant literature and promote...

This paper examines the performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB), which is an administrative database constructed by Statistics Canada by combining an administrative landing file from Citizenship and Immigration...

Some economists have attacked the two-percentage point cut in the GST to 5 per cent proposed by the Conservatives in the January 2006 Canadian federal election. The main reason for this is that many economists believe that, if money was available for tax cuts, it would make more sense to use it...

This paper argues that the two-percentage point cut in the GST to 5 per cent proposed by the Conservatives in the January 2006 Canadian federal election and implemented in the 2007 budget was not “stupid” as suggested by many economists. To the contrary, it fortuitously turned out to provide...

We focus on four previous systemic financial crises that the United States has experienced since 1870. These include the crisis of 1873 (called the Great Depression until the 1930s), the 1893 crisis, the panic of 1907, and the Great Depression. Given that all of the earlier crises predate the...

In 2011, we estimated that in 2005 Canada’s immigrant selection policies resulted in an average fiscal burden on taxpayers of $6,000 for each immigrant. Later that year, Mohsen Javdani and Krishna Pendakur from the economics department at Simon Fraser University (J&P hereafter) presented an...

This paper focuses on some of the macroeconomic risks that lie ahead for Latin America. The discussion is informed by my work on crises and capital flows and their macroeconomic consequences. The trends and initial conditions that allowed the region to weather the global economic storm of...

In this note, we attempt to place the question of how we got to the global financial crisis that began as the US Subprime debacle in the summer of 2007 in the context of an international and historical comparative setting. It is of some poignancy that the “we” here refers to the wealthiest...

The Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is the first “global” and largest carbon offset instrument, supplementing national or regional cap and trade systems such as the European Union’s Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). This paper draws on weekly IDEACarbon survey data from 2008 to...