The recent boom and bust in commodity prices has raised concerns about the impact of volatile commodity prices on Latin American countries’ fiscal positions. Using a novel quarterly dataset─ which includes unique country specific commodity price indices and a comprehensive measure of public...

A previous result by Kemnitz (2001) based on AK type endogenous growth model implied that the gains from immigration depends up on the percapita possession of capital stock by immigrant relative to that of the natives’. However, such a framework ignores the incentive labor creates for...

This paper revisits the puzzle of immigration policy: standard economic theory predicts that free immigration improves natives' welfare, but (with few historical exceptions) an open door policy is never implemented in practice. What rationalizes the puzzle? We first review the model of...

This paper examines the poor performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Statistics Canada Census 2006 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF). It presents the data which shows that immigrants from less developed countries are doing much worse than immigrants from...

In international forums the EU calls for freedom of movement for goods, services and capital. Freedom of movement of labour - labour migration in other words - is excluded from this claim, certainly in relation to medium- and low-skilled labour. This paper addresses two questions. Firstly, what...

This paper examines the impact of immigration on labour productivity in Canada. Immigration is a factor that has been largely ignored in the literature on Canadian productivity growth. A simplified growth accounting approach is utilized to estimate the reduction in labour productivity in Canada...

Despite recent interest in regionalization of immigration in host nations, most studies have analyzed immigrants’ economic performance by largely focusing on their overall national performance. A regional analysis is necessary because changing geographic distribution of immigrants can affect...

This publication provides an estimate of the fiscal burden created by recent immigration into Canada and proposes reforms to existing immigrant selection policies to eliminate the burden. It uses a 2006 Census database to estimate the average incomes and taxes paid on these by immigrants who...

This paper examines the poor performance of recent immigrants to Canada in the labour market as revealed in the Statistics Canada Census 2006 Public Use Microdata File (PUMF). It presents the data which shows that immigrants from less developed countries are doing much worse than immigrants from...

This paper examines the performance of the children of immigrants (2nd generation immigrants) to Canada using data from the 2006 Census. As the composition of immigration inflows has shifted after 1980 from the traditional European source countries to the Third World, the analysis focuses on the...