It is well known that total government spending relative to GDP is higher in Canada than in the United States, but it is less clear where exactly Canadian governments spend more (or less) than their American counterparts. The reason for the confusion is that there are no readily available,...

This paper provides a second look at the provincial distribution of federal net transfers (i.e., direct and indirect transfers received minus taxes paid) across family income groups and provinces, an issue that was previously addressed by Poschmann (1998). This paper uses the same database,...

This is the first of three papers describing NAOMI1, a new quarterly forecasting model developed in the Economic Analysis and Forecasting Division at the Department of Finance. NAOMI’s intended purpose is twofold. First, it is capable of producing reliable, judgement-free macroeconomic...

A key element of youth labour market experience is the continued decline in the number of hours young people work since the late 1980s. Unlike adults, the number of hours worked by youths has failed to grow in recent years despite the recovery. This suggests that there may be important...

This purpose of this paper is to examine the recent fall in the BU ratio — the ratio of EI beneficiaries to the unemployed. To what extent is this fall due to programme changes, and to what extent is it a temporary phenomenon related to the recession of the early 1990s? To answer these...

Fiscal redistribution across family income groups in Canada has not been studied since the experience of the 1980s. Fiscal policy has changed markedly since that time. Government finances have been consolidated, resulting in a turnaround in the Canadian fiscal position beginning in 1997. This...

Recent studies on vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) in Canada subscribe to a definition of VFI that is based on the mismatch in structural budget balances between the federal and provincial/territorial levels of government. In this framework, projected budget balances illustrate the path of VFI....

This paper provides an introduction to the Canadian side of NAOMI (North American Open economy Macro-econometric Integrated model), a new economic model developed at the Department of Finance. NAOMI is intended to bridge the gap between pure forecasting models whose forecasts are often difficult...