Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

Historical Canadian Government Data Sources

I recently received the following message from Ryan MacDonald at Statistics Canada:

“I recently came upon a number [of] scans done by our library to place the historical publications into pdfs.  They can sometimes be a little difficult to search for, so I thought I would pass along a few links that may be of use to you or your colleagues in your research.”

So, I think a good way to further disseminate these historical economic data sources more broadly is to post the links here on WCI. Feel free to share.

Canada Year Book

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.838186/publication.html

Tables of the trade and navigation of the Province of Canada for the year ... (1850-1908)

http://www.publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.843286/publication.html

Report of the Department of Customs containing the tables of imports, exports and navigation of the Dominion of Canada for the fiscal year ended Mar. 31 ... (1909-1916, 1918)

http://www.publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.843294/publication.html

Annual report of the trade of Canada (imports for consumption and exports) (1917, 1919)

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.852124/publication.html

Trade of Canada = Commerce du Canada (1920-1939)

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.851960/publication.html

Trade of Canada = Commerce du Canada (1939-1970)

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.809303/publication.html

Imports, merchandise trade / Statistics Canada, External Trade Division = Importations, commerce de marchandises / Statistique Canada, Division du commerce extérieur (1970-2002)

http://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.809322/publication.html

Reflections on Westeros

Well, it is the May long weekend and a celebration of Queen Victoria but this year it has also coincided with the end of Game of Thrones and its own set of Kings, Queens and associated dysfunctional noble figures.  There has been a lot of angst expressed about how inadequate the final season has been in terms of plot and character development and the reviews are mixed, but I will leave such matters to others. I want to focus on some other things of a more economic and political nature.

Aside from the visuals of what appears to be a Rostowian pre-takeoff economy marked by low levels of productivity, low technology and a land centered economy with a feudal type of organization, remarkably little insight was offered over the eight seasons as to what the mechanics of the economy were that marked the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros.  Indeed, given the amount of war and pillaging that inevitably must have disrupted trade routes and commerce, it is a surprise that anything was produced at all aside from a thriving weapons and armour industry.  Even the effects of climate change as the endless winter approached did not appear to spark much in the way of policy debate.  And there does appear to have been an abundance of government deficit financing with a monetary institution known as the Iron Bank holding many of the loans.  In the end, the Seven Kingdoms appear locked into a pre-industrial stasis and need some type of political and economic reforms as well as an enclosure movement and a learning focused Renaissance to boost agricultural productivity and ignite an industrial revolution.  However, the last episode suggests that the governing elites are not about to set out on the path of any social, economic or institutional innovations given the shocks of external invasion by zombie like White Walkers and the ultimate battle for the kingdom.

Accounting Identities and the Implicit Theory of Inertia

Animals can be divided into Carnivores and Non-Carnivores: A = C + NC. Therefore, if we add some wolves to an island of sheep, the number of animals on that island will increase.

It's easy to see why that argument might not be right. Wolves kill sheep. But if you didn't know that fact about wolves and sheep, the argument looks very appealing. But the equation A = C + NC tells us absolutely nothing about the world; it's an accounting identity that is true by definition. The only thing it tells you is how I have chosen to divide up the world into parts. And I can choose an infinite number of different ways to divide the world up into parts.

Here are two more examples:

1. Y = C + I + G + X - M. Therefore an increase in Government spending will increase GDP.

2. Y = C + S + T. Therefore an increase in Taxes will increase GDP.

My guess is that you are much more uncomfortable with the second of those two examples than the first. You have probably seen the first argument before, but have probably not seen the second. But they are both equally correct accounting identities and are both equally rubbish arguments.

How can a purely arbitrary choice of which accounting identity I write down make any difference at all to how we think about the world?

I call it "The Implicit Theory of Inertia": We assume a thing will keep on doing the same as it would otherwise have done, unless you give me a good reason why it wouldn't. The onus is on you to explain why more wolves would mean fewer sheep, and unless you give me a good reason I will assume that the number of sheep stays the same (or keeps growing or declining at the same rate) regardless of the number of wolves. You need the force of a good argument to overcome the assumed inertia of things. So by choosing one accounting identity over another, I am dividing the world up into one set of things rather than another, and then exploiting your Implicit Theory of Inertia to rig the argument in my favour.

Sadly, we don't just fool other people when we write down accounting identities to divide the world up one way rather than another. We fool ourselves too.

Theorising starts when we write down the variables.

The Federal Debt of the United States, 1791 to 2018: A Presidential Ranking

A recent story in the National Post by Tristan Hopper highlighted the “utterly unbelievable scale” of current US federal public debt levels.  As is always the case, it is useful to get some historical perspective on the evolution of the U.S. federal debt over time – which under President Trump has become the biggest U.S. nominal gross federal debt ever at about 22 trillion dollars.  It is also interesting to see how US federal debt levels have varied across assorted administrations over time.

Is the Russia-America Global CoDominium About to Begin?

In the wake of the Putin-Trump Helsinki summit, there is much speculation about what was actually said between Putin and Trump behind closed doors and the uncertainty spread throughout the American government about whether agreements had been reached on issues such as Syria and the Ukraine.  The subsequent invitation to Putin to visit the White house in the fall – probably just before the November elections – has resulted in further uncertainty especially after Putin’s statement that he proposed to Trump holding a referendum to resolve the eastern Ukraine issue.  So, what is really going on here?

Quite frankly, we have all been scratching our heads as the behaviour in some respects is reminiscent of 18^th and 19^th century monarchs gathering to decide the fate of wide swaths of the world in private meetings.  Putin is an autocrat and Trump is a business autocrat who admires political autocrats, so their personal level diplomacy may indeed be a series of moves designed to remake the world and return it to an age when Russian and American led blocs were the only game in town. Both the Russians and the Americans have seen their political influence decline in a multilateral world led by growing Asia-Pacific economies and both countries have been less than comfortable with the rise of China.

Public Debt: A Global Perspective

There is much international preoccupation with debt at the public sector, household and corporate levels and the upward creep in interest rates does apparently keep central bankers - including our own Mr. Poloz - awake at night.  Given the problem is an international one, sometimes it is useful to try and get a global perspective on the numbers.  One report from a relatively new  outfit known as the Institute of International Finance (IIF) recently pegged the total amount of global debt at $237 trillion (USD) or well over 300 percent of the world's annual economic output. According to one of their slides, in 2017 financial sector debt was $59 trillion, household debt $45 trillion, government debt $64 trillion and non-financial corporate debt $70 trillion.  This would make global public debt about 27 percent of the global debt total in 2017 and household debt about 19 percent with the remaining 54 percent from the corporate and financial sectors.

So What Happens in the Next Recession?

I’m not a macro economist by any stretch of the imagination and yet I cannot help wondering what is going to happen in terms of policy response the next time Canada goes into a downturn.  It is not a question of whether there will be another recession, only when. By policy response, I am of course wondering about the traditional tools used to affect aggregate demand such as fiscal and monetary policy.

150 Years of Canadian National Defence Spending

Canada’s federal government is going to deliver a new defence policy that is expected to guide Canada’s military for the next generation. While in the works for months, it comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s recent exhortation at the NATO meetings that NATO members are not spending enough and Tuesday’s speech by Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland that Canada must rely more on itself for defence signaling that today’s defence policy release will involve a significant rebuild of Canada’s military. If that is the case, moving to a foreign policy where Canada will have both “good manners” and “strong muscles” will mark a significant shift in Canadian policy – if of course there is follow through. 

Five things that can help you get your conference submission accepted

Over the past few months, I've been putting together the program for the upcoming Canadian Economics Association meetings: http://economics.ca/2017/en/.  It's a reasonable sized conference - this year we had almost 900 submissions - and quite a few papers were rejected.

Yet often papers were not accepted for conference program simply because the author made an easily avoidable mistake when submitting the paper. Here is a list of simple things that anyone can do to increase the chances of their conference submission being accepted.

1. Submit on time, and include all necessary information
2. Invest some time in writing a compelling, informative abstract. It should clearly state the research question, the methods used to answer the question, the results (if any) obtained, and explain why the answer to the research question matters.
3. Choose the right Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) codes or keywords to describe your paper. In larger conferences, the papers are typically divided by field or sub-field, and parcelled out to sub-committees. It is vitally important to make sure that your paper goes to the right sub-committee. For example, imagine a paper that takes a standard econometric technique and uses it to identify the causal effects of, say, parental leave on divorce rates. If the paper goes to the econometrics subcommittee, they will likely say "nothing new here." If it goes to a labour or economics of the family subcommitte, they may well say "yes, let's put it on the program."
4. Curate your on-line image. When I am hesitating between accepting and rejecting a paper, I typically google the author and see what comes up. Hence it is vitally important to create a google scholar profile, especially if you have a fairly common name. It is also a good idea to have a personal website, with an up-to-date c.v. on it.
5. Organize a session, and make your paper a part of it. Pre-organized sessions are attractive to conference organizers, because they involve very little work. As long as there is at least one good paper in the session, it is tempting to accept the entire thing.

This may all seem fairly obvious. But a remarkable number of papers fail to get accepted because the submitter did not do one of these five things.

 

How to write an email that will get you what you want

Most of my day-to-day social and professional interactions take place over email. It's my primary form of direct, one-on-one contact with students, colleagues, and co-authors. Consequently, my impressions of people are shaped by their emails. Are their emails polite or demanding? Clear or confusing? For good or ill, I judge people by the emails they send.

Based on my own personal experience, I am not alone. Others have judged me by the emails I have sent. I once lost someone's friendship because of a misjudged bcc. I am no expert on the right way to send emails.

But I have learned a thing or two from sending and receiving tens of thousands of emails, good and bad. One is that the ultimate goal of most email senders is to ask - clearly, politely and respectfully - for something. This post offers my personal reflections on how to achieve that goal.

Infrastructure Overbuilds: Past and Present

Thomas Gunton of Simon Fraser University’s Resource and Environmental Planning Program had a piece in yesterday’s Globe and Mail raising the question if the statement of support for the Keystone XL pipeline and the approval of two other pipelines was moving Canada to a situation of surplus capacity when it comes to pipelines? Gunton’s answer was yes.

Happy New Year....Really!

Well, it’s the start of a New Year and traditionally there should be a sense of optimism to a fresh start. Indeed, at least one forecasting company feels that the global outlook for 2017 is at least stable despite the challenges of 2016 and indeed is expecting an uptick in commodity prices. However, given the course of world events over the last twelve months, one might think that there is little to be optimistic amount. On the one hand, the events of 2016 to me seem to mark the end of what can be termed the second great globalization (more detail here on that). It was a period that saw per capita GDP globally grow as a result of technological change, integrated markets and trade much like the first great globalization from 1870 to 1913.

The Historical Statistics of Canada Are Back!

If you recall, several posts ago I lamented that the downloadable csv files that used to be part of archived web edition of Historical Statistics of Canada seemed to have disappeared or were not working.  I am delighted to say that the files are back. 

What Happened to Historical Statistics of Canada?

For whatever reason, Statistics Canada has changed the nature of the access to its web version of Historical Statistics of Canada.  Until recently, the electronic version of this classic work of data (with paper editions published in 1965 and 1983) covering Canada from 1867 to the mid 1970s provided the tables of the assorted sections in HTML, PDF and CSV formats.  That has changed and not exactly for the better.

Fact Check: Bias at the CEA?

This was written by Trevor Tombe of the University of Calgary.

In a recent Financial Post opinion piece by Phillip Cross (entitled “Discounting Business Knowledge” HERE), he finds the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Economics Association guilty of bias. Allow me to quote him at length:

Analysing the 64-page CEA agenda shows a not very surprising bias to where the CEA thinks knowledge about economics resides in our society. Of the 600 odd papers being presented, 90 per cent are from university professors, while two-thirds of the remainder come from government organizations (mostly central banks). Only 3 per cent of papers come from outside university and the public sector…

From these observations he concludes that “according to the CEA, there is essentially no knowledge in the business sector worth tapping.” Unfortunately for Mr. Cross, many of these observations are either misleading or sometimes simply false. The actual data tell a very different story. (Special thanks to Paula Emery and especially Werner Antweiler for providing the relevant statistics.)

A Very Brief History of Demand and Supply

I’m teaching History of Economic Thought again this year and during my progression through the material this term what has struck me is the very long road over time –literally hundreds of years - to understanding markets and value as the simultaneous interaction both supply and demand side factors culminating in the standard diagram of price and quantity determination in a market. There was recognition of separate demand and supply side factors and even adjustment to some idea of equilibrium as far back as the medieval period but the concepts were like ships passing in the night when it came to price determination.  However, what also struck me is how much of the theory of demand and supply was ultimately grasped nearly simultaneously in the nineteenth century by an assortment of economists working separately.

Urban GDP

Statistics Canada has released experimental estimates of gross domestic product for the period 2001 to 2009 for 33 census metropolitan areas.  The results of course reinforce what we already know – that Canada’s economic activity is concentrated in its cities and half of our GDP is produced in just six cities – Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa-Gatineau.  Of course,the Toronto CMA is the dominant center with about 20 percent of Canada’s GDP being produced there.  However, there is more to these results than just an affirmation of what we think we know.

The New Mercantilists

In its search for new revenues, Ontario commissioned a government panel to examine how to wring more money out of government assets.  In recent days, the panel led by TD Bank CEO Ed Clark has revealed several ideas including selling off Hydro One’s distribution business, restructuring Ontario Power Generation so it provides more revenues and modernizing the Liquor Control Board so that it can generate more revenues via internet sales.  Moreover, Ed Clark also suggested that the Beer Store – which is a private monopoly sanctioned by the Ontario government – should also be used to provide more money for the Ontario government.

Government Dependency - Recent CMA Building Permit Composition in Canada

Ultimately all economics is local.  Ontario municipalities are in the final throes of a municipal election race and in my own community the question of municipal economic development via public sector construction spending has come up.  The concern is that much of the economic activity in my community over the last four years has been the result of taxpayer funded building projects given that traditional private sector activity in the transportation and resource sector has dried up.  One of my incumbent councilors wrote in to “set the record straight” by presenting some local building permit composition numbers.  Of course my curiosity was piqued to see what the composition of building permits is like in Canada and particularly how CMAs compare when it comes to institutional and government investment spending activity.

Why do I hate driverless cars?

I hate driverless cars. That is the fact that needs to be explained. Not justified, but explained.

Driverless cars pose no threat to my job, my income, or my wealth. That's not it.

The insurance companies, or safety-nazis, might force us to use driverless cars. That would be a threat to my enjoyment of driving. But even if that threat were eliminated, so each of us always had the option to drive ourselves, I would still hate driverless cars. That's not it either.

What I hate is the very option to use a driverless car. Because being able to exercise that option, even if I did not have to exercise that option, would make "driving" something very different from what it is without that option. In much the same way that "hunting" means something very different today in an agricultural economy with supermarkets than it did for our ancestors. "Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier and safer to just buy some meat at the supermarket, or do you think it's fun to kill animals for sport?" "Why not just press the auto button, so you can sit back and relax and enjoy the scenery or read a book?"