Tag Archives: Employment

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...

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A little while back, Pavlina Tcherneva appeared with Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal to talk about the potential infrastructure policy of president-elect Donald Trump. She noted that, contrary to initial assumptions, the upcoming administration may not end up pushing public-debt-financed infrastructure spending, and that if the program simply amounts to tax incentives and public-private partnerships, it won’t be nearly as effective. But Tcherneva added another important dimension to this...

Jobs numbers out today. Employment increased by 151,000 in August, and the unemployment rate is still at 4.9% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report. This suggests that the slow recovery continues, and that to hike the rate of interest as it seems Janet Yellen suggested last week at Jackson Hole would be a mistake. By the way, Bill Gross, which sometimes sounds reasonable on spending and the effects of fiscal policy (or did in the past) suggested as an innovative solution...