We investigate the influence of public policy on interprovincial migration in Canada using new aggregated migration data for 1974-1996, the longest period studied so far. We consider the consequences of regional variation in a variety of policies, and also investigate the effects of certain extraordinary events in Quebec and in the Atlantic provinces. The results indicate that while the changing bias in the unemployment insurance system may have induced some people to move to the relatively high unemployment Atlantic region, the resulting flows are likely too small to have altered regional unemployment rates. In contrast, political events in Quebec in the 1970's and the closing of the cod fishery in 1992 appear to be associated with large changes in migration patterns.
Ronald Wintrobe (1990, 1998) has recently provided a theoretical foundation for estimating equations that attempt to explain the dependence of civil liberties & political rights in nondemocratic regimes on the history of economic growth. This theory suggests that data from different kinds of nondemocratic countries should not be pooled without allowing coefficients to vary with regime type. It also places interesting restrictions on the signs of the coefficients of economic growth in equations explaining freedom in the types of regimes Wintrobe identifies. In this paper, we employ these restrictions to test Wintrobe's theory. Some additional hypotheses about the difference between democratic & nondemocratic regimes & about the role of education, not considered by Wintrobe, are also investigated. The results indicate clearly that the relationship between the degree of freedom -- as measured by the sum of the Gastil indexes of civil liberties & political rights -- & economic growth varies significantly across all types of regimes. Totalitarians (that attempt to maximize power) are clearly different than tinpots (that just attempt to maintain power) in this respect, & nondemocratic regimes differ from democracies. Other aspects of the theory are partially confirmed. In particular, in totalitarian regimes, positive growth reduces freedom & negative growth increases it in some specifications. The theory predicts the opposite pattern for tinpots, & we do find that negative growth reduces freedom in tinpot regimes. However, positive growth in tinpots also appears to reduce freedom in some cases, which is not in accord with the theory. Secondary schooling has a positive effect on freedom, as in previous empirical work, a result that is shown here to hold even when each type of regime is considered separately. But the effect of primary schooling is different: in tinpot & totalitarian regimes, but not in democracies, primary schooling is associated with reduced freedom. 7 Tables, 1 Appendix, 25 References. Adapted from the source document.
Keynes' General Theory (1936) is arguably one of the most important books of the twentieth century. His ideas for stabilizing the aggregate economy have profoundly influenced economic theory as well as popular opinion about what governments can and should do with respect to the business cycle. On the other hand, whether Keynesian theory has substantially altered the course of public policy remains an open question. In this paper we identify the elements required for any investigation of the impact of Keynes' ideas on policy choices and then conduct our own 'search for Keynes', applying an intertemporal spatial voting framework to study the fiscal history of the Government of Canada from 1870 to 2000. The long time series allows the construction of a counterfactual - one of several essential elements - showing what governments would have planned to do after Keynes', if Keynes' ideas had not in fact been present. Our results suggest that textbook Keynesianism is identifiable in the Canadian data.
We study the effect of franchise extension on the fiscal structure of central and local governments in the United Kingdom between 1820 and 1913 to revisit the Redistribution Hypothesis - the prediction that franchise extension causes an increase in state-sponsored redistribution. We adopt a novel method of uncovering causality from non-experimental data proposed by Hoover (2001). This method is based on tests for structural breaks in the marginal and conditional distributions of the franchise and fiscal structure time series preceded by a detailed historical narrative analysis. We do not find any compelling evidence that supports the Redistribution Hypothesis.
We study the political economy of the environment in autocratic, weak and strong democracies when individuals can mitigate the health consequences of domestic pollution privately as well as control pollution collectively through public policies. We consider a small open economy with comparative advantage in dirty goods. With costly private mitigation, income inequality leads to an unequal distribution of the burdens of pollution (in accordance with the evidence). We show that the eco-friendliness ranking of political regime types varies with the cost of private mitigation and that increased inequality has non-monotonous effects on equilibrium pollution levels. In weak democracies, the political equilibrium may be characterized by low environmental standards but highly restricted trade, thus leading to ambiguous outcomes regarding pollution levels. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]
We study the political economy of the environment in autocratic, weak and strong democracies when individuals can either mitigate the health consequences of domestic pollution privately or reduce pollution collectively through public policy. The setting is that of a small open economy in which incomes depend importantly on trade in dirty goods, where income inequality and the degree to which ordinary citizens exert voice in each dimension of the policy process distinguishes elites and ordinary citizens. The recognition that the health consequences of pollution can be dealt with privately at a cost adds an important dimension to the analysis of the political economy of environmental regulation, especially for an open economy. When private mitigation is feasible, inequality of incomes leads to an unequal distribution of the health burden of pollution (in accordance with the epidemiologic evidence), thus polarizing the interests of citizens in democracies and of ordinary citizens and elites in non-democratic regimes. Inequality in the willingness to bear the cost of private mitigation in turn interacts with the pollution costs and income benefits of trade in dirty goods to further polarize interests concerning both environmental stringency and the regulation of trade openness. In this context, we show how the eco-friendliness ranking of different political regimes varies with the cost of private mitigation and with the extent of income inequality, tending to converge when mitigation costs are high, and even producing a ranking reversal between democracies and autocracies, and between weak and strong democracies, when costs lie in an intermediate range.
