This article analyzes the distributional impact of the Canadian Goods and Services Tax, which was implemented in 1989, using the Social Policy Simulation and Database, a sophisticated micro-simulation tool developoed by Statistics Canada.

Interprovincial trade barriers are a drag on Canadian productivity and send an embarrassing message to international investors.Despite some past progress in reducing them, they remain an irritant to our economic union. Trade liberalization as pursued by Alberta and British Columbia in the TILMA...

The Department of Finance employs extensively a large macroeconomic model of the Canadian economy -- the QFS model(Quarterly Forecasting and Simulation Model) -- for economic and fiscal forecasting and simulation exercises. As with any large macroeconomic model, and particularly one that plays a...

The debate between keynesians and monetarists on the effectiveness of fiscal policy has been going for quite a long time, and all efforts to resolve it have met with little success. While everyone would agree that the controversy can only be resolved on empirical grounds, there is no agreement...

This article reports on the results of an analysis of the distributional impact in 1990 of the federal tax and transfer changes introduced by the Canadian government from the time of its election in 1984 through the announcement of its February 1990 budget. The analysis uses Statistics Canada's...

Agriculture Canada is concerned about the funding of agricultural programs as the number of shared-cost federal-provincial programs increase and requests from provinces for special assistance proliferate. Many of these requests are justified on the basis that the provinces do not have the...

Estimates of economic activity generated and jobs created that are derived using input-output analysis are often presented in program evaluations and confused with the benefits resultin g from die program. Two such cases are presented as examples. We argue that for two main reasons this type of...

The Province of Alberta has been a participant in the Tax Collection Agreements (TCAs) with the Federal Government covering the personal income tax since their inception in 1962. Under the terms of this agreement, the Federal Government undertakes to collect the Alberta personal income tax at no...

This paper discusses the Canadian experience in the early 1980s with tax incentives for R&D.It presents some issues concerning the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the various government tax incentives in stimulating R&D.