Fixing a Persistent Problem: Canada's Regional Pockets of Unemployment

Canada's Employment Insurance program pays weekly benefits to the unemployed that vary in generosity across regions. While the variable entrance requirements help deliver more benefits to seasonal workers, the mechanism spreads the generosity of benefits to all workers in a region, raising the costs of the program and hindering labour market adjustment.social policy, Canadian EI program, employment insurance reform

WATER RIGHTS AND THEIR SIGNIFICANCE TO AGRICULTURE

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

The Fragile Fiscal Pulse of Canada's Industrial Heartland: Ontario 2011 Budget

The author argues unless the Ontario provincial government takes aggressive steps to bring its budget to balance, debt service costs could rise sharply, and Ontarians could find themselves contributing a much larger share of their incomes to servicing the provincial debt.Fiscal and Tax Competitiveness, Ontario provincial budget

Supporting Employees who Deploy: The Case for Financial Assistance to Employers of Military Reservists

Military reservists have become a vital component of Canada’s forces at home and abroad, and like their counterparts in the regular forces, provide a service for all Canadians. However, owing to recent federal and provincial job protection legislation, employers of reservists tend to bear a disproportionate share of the costs when their employees are deployed overseas or domestically. If reservists choose to take on full-time military duties, their civilian employer’s search for a temporary replacement worker of equal skill represents a genuine and potentially significant cost. An unintended consequence of the current policy framework is that relationships among employers, reservist employees, and the military can be eroded.Canadian military, Canadian Forces, military reservists, Canadian employers, Department of National Defence

Manitoba’s Demographic Challenge: Why Improving Aboriginal Education Outcomes Is Vital for Economic Prosperity

As a wave of babyboomers retire, the upcoming decade will see only a modest expansion in Manitoba’s available workforce, and most of this net increase will depend on job-seeking young Aboriginals. Policy reforms should encourage more Aboriginal students to finish high school. Smart reforms to financial aid for postsecondary education would demonstrate aid availability to students early in their academic careers. This would bolster student educational aspirations during secondary studies for those on the margins of accessing postsecondary education. With large numbers of Aboriginal high-school dropouts, Manitoba cannot, and should not, rely solely on expanding international immigration to boost workforce growth.Economic Growth and Innovation, Manitoba, Aboriginal youth, education

Nothing to fear? Equal representation in the Scottish parliament and the threat of legal challenge

No abstract available

Magnetic fields

Effects of high and low gradient magnetic fields on human performance for space flight application

Greater Saving Required: Ahow Alberta Can Achieve Fiscal Sustainability from its Resource Revenues

The challenges that come with an abundant supply of resource wealth present difficult fiscal decisions for the Alberta government. One highly publicized concern is the need for the province to devise a long-run plan for resource revenue savings.fiscal policy, fiscal sustainability, government spending

Core, What is it Good For? Why the Bank of Canada Should Focus on Headline Inflation

With inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) growing faster than the Bank of Canada’s 2 percent target, the Bank has pointed out that core CPI, which excludes items whose prices are especially volatile, is at or below target and, further, that the Bank anticipates total CPI eventually will converge with the core measure. While the Bank is certainly justified in using core CPI as one of many imperfect measures of underlying inflation, our results suggest that the Bank should, at a minimum, revisit the role of core within its inflation-targeting framework and consider de-emphasizing core CPI in its communications or as an operational guide.Monetary Policy, Bank of Canada, inflation, Consumer Price Index (CPI), core CPI

Making Markets for Merit Goods: The Political Economy of Antiretrovirals

This paper examines the role of policy entrepreneurs and global activists in shaping the international market for antiretroviral drugs to combat HIV/AIDS. When ARVs first came on the market in the 1990s they were exceedingly expensive; the cost of treatment was upwards of $10,000 per year. These drugs were thus accessible only to those patients who had high incomes. But in 2006, the “international community,” meeting at a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS), made an astonishing pledge to those who were infected with HIV. It proclaimed that there should be universal access to ARV treatment. This UNGASS, following up on an earlier historic UN special session devoted entirely to AIDS in 2001, marked the first time in history that the international community pledged itself to chronic care for the ill, which in this case includes the approximately 30 million people around the world estimated to be HIV positive. How do we explain the transformation of ARVs from private goods, which only a few could afford, into merit goods that were (at least declaratively) to be made available to everyone? In other words, how does a norm of “universal access to treatment”—that no person should be denied these life-extending drugs—become the ethical basis for global public policy with respect to pharmaceutical allocation? What are the lessons of the ARV story for other global issues? These are the primary questions we explore in this paper. Briefly, we argue that the policy entrepreneurs and activists who promoted the creation of a universal access to treatment regime—of the transformation of ARVs into global merit goods—relied on a combination of moral arguments and ideas with favorable material circumstances. From the ethical perspective, the task of these entrepreneurs was to convince the “international community” that access to ARVs was a “human right,” or conversely to convince decision-makers that it was morally wrong to allocate these life-enhancing drugs solely on the basis of ability to pay. But from a material standpoint, these arguments were greatly facilitated by the lowering prices of ARVs caused by a combination of differential pricing (that is, lower prices for drugs in the developing world than in the advanced welfare states) and competition from generics producers, coupled with increases in foreign aid spending devoted to HIV/AIDS and other diseases.HIV/AIDS; ARVs; antiretrovirals; activists; policy entrepreneurs; merit goods; international community; global public health; global public policy; foreign aid