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We investigate how successive Alberta governments have responded to shocks in non-renewable resource revenue over the period 1970 to 2017. Our results show that Alberta governments have increased spending by 63 cents in the fiscal year following a one dollar increase in real per capita non-renewable resource revenues. On the other hand, when non-renewable resource revenues have declined year over year, Alberta governments have not adjusted spending or other own source tax revenues. As a result of these asymmetric responses to fluctuations in resource revenues, the province's stock of financial assets has declined and its net debt has increased by $10,834 per capita or in total $46 billion dollars. The policy implication of our results is that provincial governments should put increases in non-renewable resource revenues in a fiscal stabilization fund or Alberta Heritage Saving Trust Fund rather than spending two-thirds of any short-term increase in revenues. This would result in a less volatile spending pattern and a sustainable fiscal policy with better services and lower tax rates.

Over the last half-century, the Alberta government has been heavily reliant on non-renewable resource revenues, which have averaged about 30 per cent of the provincial government's total revenue. This reliance poses a fiscal challenge as resource revenues are volatile and uncertain due to the vagaries of global energy price shocks, pipeline disruptions and other events such as the federal government's National Energy Program. This commentary shows that the Alberta government's budgetary responses to fluctuations in resource revenues have had long-term deleterious consequences for the province's fiscal health.

The equalization system has long been considered a vital underpinning of the Canadian federation: a means to create some purported fairness or justice among the provinces, by redistributing the wealth of provinces with larger fiscal capacities to allow those with weaker fiscal capacities to provide roughly equivalent services to their citizens. However, the mechanics of the equalization formula have long been suspected of being flawed. Since grant-receiving provinces can adjust the way their fiscal capacities are calculated and reflected in the equalization formula — by adjusting tax rates and spending, for instance — governments are confronted with incentives to design their fiscal regimes in ways that maximize the size of the grants they receive, even if the fiscal policies are designed for less-than-optimal economic efficiency. The incentive for grant-receiving governments to "game" the formula, even unconsciously, is apparent; what has remained largely unresolved is to what extent is it actually occurring. This analysis shows that indeed it is occurring, and to a measurable degree. It finds that equalization grants provide recipient provinces with incentive to raise their business and personal tax rates. This is because when a government raises its own tax rate, it raises the national standard average tax rate, which is used in the equalization allocation formula. That, in turn, raises the individual "have-not" province's equalization-grant entitlement. Exacerbating the problem is that the tax-raising provincial governments tend to underestimate the deadweight cost that the tax hikes will have, potentially worsening the fiscal situation of a province that already faces difficult economic challenges. This analysis also finds that the equalization-grant allocation system encourages spending among recipient provinces, particularly on health-care services, resource conservation, industrial assistance, environment and housing. Results show that for every $1.00 increase in equalization grants, recipient provinces further increase spending by an additional $0.64 in total expenditure. Neither effect necessarily furthers the equalization program's idealistic intent. The promotion of higher tax rates especially would seem to work at odds with the program's conceptualization of a federal redistribution model. By potentially further repelling business and taxpayers from "have-not" provinces, the result could be making those provinces increasingly needy while continually reducing their citizens' wealth. The equalization formula is not unfixable. The arrangement can be made to work even better, in a way that maintains the principle of redistributing wealth from more privileged provinces to less privileged ones, while avoiding the perverse incentives that motivate "have-not" provinces to raise taxes. If equalization grants were substituted with block grants that are unrelated to taxing capacity, taxes in grant-receiving provinces may actually decline. A $100 per capita increase in block grants is potentially associated with an up to 2.6 percentage points drop in business tax and an up to 0.26 percentage point drop in personal income tax. The result would be an equalization arrangement that could help increase, rather than decrease, competitiveness in the very "have-not" provinces that most urgently need to attract investment. Switching to block grants would not only keep the integrity of the principles behind equalization in tact, it would actually make equalization work better for all provinces.

Abstract
This paper extends the Mankiw and Weinzierl (2006) model and examines the revenue effects of capital and labor income tax cuts under alternative financing regimes. Our analysis suggests that the revenue losses from capital and labor income tax cuts are the highest when the tax cuts are productive spending-financed and the lowest when transfer payments are used to finance the tax cuts. For plausible parameter values consistent with the US economy, we find that about 47 percent of a transfer-financed capital income tax cut is self-financing. The corresponding result for a productive spending-financed capital income tax cut is only 6 percent.

This paper investigates the long-run effects of the corporate income tax (CIT) rate on the economic growth of Canadian provinces using annual panel data for the period 1981-2016. We find evidence of a statistically significant negative long-term relationship between the provincial statutory CIT rate and economic growth. The model has the properties of a neo-classical growth model in that a reduction in the CIT rate "temporarily" increases the growth rate of the economy before returning to its long-run run growth rate. However, the temporary growth effects are economically significant and persistent. According to our preferred specification of the econometric model, one percentage point reduction in a provincial government's statutory CIT rate increases the growth rate by 0.12 percentage points four years after the initial CIT rate cut and increases real per capita GDP by 1.2 percent in the long-run. We use the model to simulate the recently announced reduction in the CIT rate in Alberta from 12 percent in 2018 to 8 percent in 2022. The simulation results indicate that the growth rate of real per capita GDP would increase by 0.92 percentage points in 2022 and by 0.28 percentage points in 2029. The model also predicts that real per capita GDP would be 2.5 percent higher in 2022 and 6.5 percent higher in 2029. This would translate into employment increases of approximately 58,000 in 2022 and 172,000 by 2029. Our results indicate that provincial governments could significantly improve economic performance by lowering provincial corporate income tax rates.

Shortly after its election in May 2019, the new Alberta government began fulfilling its promise to reduce the provincial corporate income tax (CIT) rate. The rate cut began in July 2019, when the government dropped the CIT rate from 12 to 11 per cent. The rate is scheduled to decline to 10 per cent on Jan. 1, 2020, followed by further one-percentage-point reductions in 2021 and 2022, bring the Alberta CIT rate down to eight per cent in 2022

Raising taxes can come at a serious cost. Not just to the taxpayer, of course, but to the economy. Every tax hike naturally leads people or companies to reallocate resources in ways that are less productive, resulting in a loss of income-generating opportunities. At a certain point, raising taxes becomes manifestly counterproductive, with the revenue lost due to the negative economic effects outweighing any tax gains. In cases like that, a government would actually raise more money by lowering taxes, broadening the tax base, than it does by increasing taxes. In fact, an analysis of the tax-base elasticities of the provinces, using data from 1972 to 2010, reveals that this very phenomenon is what occurred in Saskatchewan, which raised corporate taxes to a point where it began to backfire, sabotaging the government's goal of raising more revenue. It also occurred in New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, P.E.I., and Nova Scotia. In all these provinces, tax increases on corporate earnings actually ended up yielding less for the provinces than the provincial governments would have collected had they instead lowered corporate income taxes. In five other provinces, governments undermined their own provincial economies over the same period, raising corporate taxes when they would have been better off actually cutting the corporate income tax, and making up the difference with a revenue-neutral sales tax. Alberta, Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec all paid dearly for the decision to hit corporations with higher taxes, by sacrificing what could have been significant welfare gains had they sought to raise the same amount of revenue through higher sales taxes (or in the case of Alberta, a new sales tax). Quebec, at least, has lower tax-base elasticity than the others, however, possibly due to its unique cultural and linguistic characteristics, which may make it somewhat less likely for people and investors to leave the province. The evidence clearly demonstrates that corporate income taxes are far more sensitive to changes in the provincial tax rate than are personal income taxes or general sales taxes. Of course, it is not hard to see why politicians may feel political pressure to raise taxes on corporations, who do not vote, rather than passing tax increases onto residents, who do. But, while taxing corporations may be popular, preferred both by the voters and the politicians, when creating greater economic opportunities for their residents, provinces would have been far better off, over the measured 38-year period, looking elsewhere for additional revenue. As politically contentious as it may be, that means going easier on corporations and instead raising personal income and sales taxes.

Inequality is on the rise in Canada and this state of affairs has provoked outrage and demands for redistribution at a time when governments at every level are searching for reliable long-term growth. This paper examines the links between income inequality and economic growth and whether there is a trade-off between redistributive policies, and economic growth, or whether income redistribution can enable faster growth. The authors survey the existing literature on the impact of inequality on economic growth, and then conduct an econometric analysis of the association between provincial economic growth in Canada and three different measures of income inequality, finding no statistically significant relationships. One measure of income redistribution, the difference between the market income Gini coefficient and the disposable (after-tax, after-transfer) income Gini is positively associated with provincial growth rates — but since the largest transfer programs in Canada are federal programs financed out of nation-wide taxes, it is unlikely that this association carries over to the national level. Much of the growth in income disparity has been driven by innovation that places a premium on highly trained workers. With that in mind, the Goldin-Katz model, used to explain the rising earnings differentials of highly skilled workers in the US, can be combined with the Aghion-Bolton model of capital market imperfections to develop a framework for examining the impact of education spending, and the taxes that finance it, on earnings inequality and economic growth. The authors then review evidence that raising marginal tax rates on high-income individuals would not raise additional tax revenues, but impose substantial costs on the economy, as would higher corporate income taxes. Punishing high earners is a self-defeating choice, although improvements to the social safety net would give more Canadians the chance to join their ranks.

We test the hypothesis that the flypaper effect can arise if the recipient government finances part of its expenditures with a distortionary tax. We present a simple theoretical framework that shows how a lump-sum transfer stimulates the marginal expenditures of a recipient government through an income effect and a price effect. We test the predictions of this model using data on Canadian provincial expenditures and federal transfers to the provinces over the period 1981 to 2008. Our econometric results indicate that a $ 0.10 increase in a provincial government's marginal cost of public funds increases the stimulative effect of lump-sum grants by $ 0.32.