Tag: Economics
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The Macroeconomic Impacts of Industrial Regulation
How can governments analyse the broader economic effects of proposed regulations in an interconnected economy? Governments change hundreds if not thousands of regulations and laws every year, ostensibly to protect citizens’ health and safety and to assure the proper functioning of free markets. These regulations are only effective with compliance, which necessarily means that businesses…
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The Double Diamond Design Process for Policy
How a framework from product and service design would help policymakers find the right programs and regulations to solve societal problems Through my many years working with regulators and policymakers, I have heard that they often struggle at the earliest stages of designing regulation. Often the impetus to develop a new program or regulation starts…
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Reducing Regulatory Red-Tape Prevents Corruption
Regulations, like building codes and permitting, are ostensibly designed to protect the safety and well-being of citizens. These licences and permits ensure that buildings are safe for its occupants. However, the lengthy process puts critical financial and economic power in the hands of a few bureaucrats.
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Road to Ruin: Tesla vs. Auto Dealers
Tesla Motors, the famed electric vehicle startup from billionaire Elon Musk, is feeling the full brunt of auto dealers associations wielding antiquated regulations. On March 11th, the state of New Jersey, facing complaints from the New Jersey Auto Dealers Association, banned Tesla from selling its electric cars directly over the internet from the factory to…
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An Economist’s Take on Digital Paywalls
From premium newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times to made-up news weeklies like Weekly World News to the satirical magazine The Onion, nearly all news websites have adopted, or at least tested, a paywall for online readers. Yet, prominent economists have discovered gaping holes in a business strategy that has…
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The Argument for Better Access to AEDs
I recently took my very first First Aid course with CPR and AED certification for St. John’s ambulance and I was astounded to learn how effective Automatic External Defibrillators (AEDs) are at saving lives. In cases of cardiac arrest, an AED can double the rate of survival from an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (Weisfeldt et. al.).…
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Why Egypt Could Fail
I’ve finally had a chance to read Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. It provides a useful tool for looking at the President Morsi’s attempt to centralize power in his own office could damage Egypt’s fragile economy. In Why Nations Fail Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson reiterate throughout that politically inclusive institutions,…
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The Cost of Regulatory Opacity
The Canadian government’s recent blocking of the sale of Progress Energy Resources to Malaysian state-owned Petronas has raised calls to act on the vagueness of the “net benefit” test applied to mergers in Canada over $331 million. The lack of clear criteria for this net benefit test has serious economic implications for investment in Canada.…
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The Problem with Labour Moblity: Opportunity is not Enough
It is a well known fact that labour mobility is low in the E.U, despite the disparate strength of member countries’ economies. In fact, only 0.2% of EU citizens move to work in another country in any given year. Far lower than the 2% to 2.5% of Americans who change States in any given year.…
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There Is No ‘Competitive Economy’ On/Off Switch
As anticipated by many observers, elections in Greece ended in stalemate as many Greeks elected to support the Coalition of the Radical Left and other anti-austerity parties over that the two traditional parties, New Democracy and PASOK. One of the bailout conditions that the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left, Alexis Tsipras, refuses to…
Envelope Economics 