Tag Archives: Employment

Oxford University Press has recently released the second edition of Social Policy in Canada, co-authored by the father-daughter duo of Ernie Lightman and Naomi Lightman. I recommend this book as an excellent resource for students of social policy. It will be useful for classroom instruction, while also being a handy reference for researchers, persons who design and administer social policy, and persons who advocate for improved social policy. Here are 10 things to know: 1. The book does an...

Michael Stephens | September 8, 2017 If you’re in the vicinity of New York City at the end of October, Levy scholars Randall Wray and Stephanie Kelton are taking part in a public meeting organized by the National Jobs for All Coalition. The meeting is part of a series of public events focused on the legacy of New Deal. Wray and Kelton will be participating in a panel on the job guarantee — “Political and Economic Prospects for...

It’s an all-too common refrain among US corporations: we have jobs available, but simply can’t find qualified workers to fill them. Economists, including top Federal Reserve officials, lend credibility to this dubious claim by arguing there is a "skills gap" among US workers that is preventing firms from finding employees with the right backgrounds. However, ample research and basic common sense suggests that wage stagnation, which has dominated the US job landscape in recent decades, is...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. The summer ape blockbuster you’re been waiting for is here. In Science economists Seema Jayachandran, and Joost de Laat team up with  satellite researchers Eric Lambin, Charlotte Stanton, Robin Audy, and Nancy Thomas (with some help from IPA and Uganda’s Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust). They ran the first RCT showing that just paying farmers in Uganda a little bit not to cut down forest on their land where...

The Taylor “Review of Modern Working Practices”, published on Tuesday, is a fundamentally complacent document:“National labour markets have strengths and weaknesses and involve trade-offs between different goals but the British way is rightly seen internationally as largely successful.”True, the report expresses a number of reasonable aspirations and contains a number of sensible but gentle proposals, but it fails to come up with any strong proposals for dealing with the real...

The 2017 OECD Employment Outlook provides an assessment of member country performance in terms of the quantity and quality of employment as judged by a new set of key indicators. Overall, we do well in terms of job quantity. The employment rate (the proportion of the working age population with jobs) stands at 72.5% compared to an OECD average of 66.4%. However, the Scandinavian countries rank higher for this indicator (eg Sweden, 75.5%.) It is interesting to note that the employment rate in...

I’ve just written a blog post about the fiscal situation of Canada’s ‘oil rich’ provinces (i.e., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador). It consists of a summary of key points raised at a PEF-sponsored panel at this year’s Annual Conference of the Canadian Economics Association. Points raised in the blog post include the following: -The price of oil is impossible to accurately predict, and there’s no guarantee it will rise to past levels. -Each of Canada’s ‘oil rich’ provinces...

It had to happen. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has refused to commit to a net migration target. Facing a barrage of complaints from the hospitality industry about potential staff shortages post-Brexit, Rudd appears to be softening the government's line. She told BBC Radio 5Live's Pienaar's Politics: "My personal view is we need to continue to bring immigration down. I want to make sure that we do it in a way that supports businesses.” So what way might that be, then? After all, her boss...

I have an opinion piece on Saskatchewan’s recent budget in the Regina Leader-Post. Points raised in the opinion piece include the following: -Reductions in personal and corporate income taxes help the rich more than the poor (and this budget cut both personal and corporate income taxes). -Increases in sales tax hurt the poor more than the rich (and this budget increased both the breadth and the rate of the provincial sales tax). -A one-dollar increase in government spending on public...

So the BLS has the new job numbers for March. Recovery continues at slow pace, as expected. 98k jobs created, considerably below the 200k average of the last couple of years, and unemployment rate  reduced to 4.5% with the participation rate up a little bit, but still below its previous peak, at 63% of the labor force. The danger is that many more will suggested that we are now below the natural rate of unemployment (yes, that is a very problematic concept, something discussed here many...