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Planning and evaluating any health care program is a formidable task: how do you measure the health of a population? This fundamental question has been approached from various perspectives in medical, administrative, and economic studies. This book provides a guide to health measurement literature and relates it to Ontario's current and prospective policy choices and to the federal context of health indicators and indices to existing statistics in Ontario in a county-by-county survey of the province's health care. He also outlines the kinds of information essential to health assessment but not currently available. The book as a whole emphasizes the importance of health care measurement in the humane and efficient planning of health services. It will be of interest to all concerned with the practice of medicine in the 1980s and the planning of health services at the federal and provincial levels, as well as to those with a special interest in health from the economic, political, and sociological perspectives.
This book examines the influence of transport costs on regional economic development in northern Ontario. It begins with an overview of the Canadian freight rate structure, with emphasis on railway rates, and a brief look at the history of federal rate policy. A theoretical model of rate determination is then constructed to permit measurement of the impact on producers and consumers of alternative rate-setting policies. Using econometric techniques and 1975 data, rate changes are related to the inputs and outputs of northern Ontario’s economy, and the effect on the region of subsidies and regulations is discussed. Freight rates on inbound shipments are found to be much higher than on goods exported from the area. A central discovery is that regulations limiting competition in the Ontario trucking industry have raised highway freight rates significantly beyond the national average. In this situation transport subsidies are unlikely to affect rates, Professor Bonsor argues; the most effective way to lower unduly high freight rates in northern Ontario, he suggests, is to eliminate entry restrictions and promote vigorous competition in the highway trucking industry.
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
This book describes and analyses the provincial government's role in municipal and regional planning. The conversion of farmland to urban and other uses is discussed, as are the issues raised by the reports of the Ontario Planning Act Review Committee and the Federal/Provincial Task Force on the Supply and Price of Serviced Residential Land and the province's Green Paper on Planning for Agriculture. The authors criticize the government's failure to conduct cost-benefit studies before setting up planning programs and show that there is little factual basis for recent alarm over the disappearance of farmland. Data gathered here for the first time show that the conversion of agricultural land to built-up urban use and non-farm rural residential use in Ontario has been taking place quite slowly in view of the rate of productivity increase in agriculture, the stock of agricultural land, and the decline in the acreage of census farms. Economists will find in this book a useful survey of recent trends and policies. Planners, policy-makers, and students will welcome this detailed case study of how economic analysis ought to be used in formulating land use policies.
Over the past several years Canadian and international trade policy has been the subject of intense public debate, and near the top of Canada's publicpolicy agenda. The present volume is offered as a further contribution topublic understanding of the policy issues involved. It represents theoutcome of a study over the past two years of how heightened internationalcompetition moves governments, on the one hand, to reinforce barriers toimports as a means of protecting domestic producers and, on the other hand, to encourage and assist producers to adjust to change.
Distribution analysis has advanced remarkably in recent years, and this is a valuable application of its principles to a Canadian context. The book provides an extensive survey of recent literature and a new source of income and wealth distribution data for Ontario, drawn from newly available microdata sets. It also presents an evaluation of the data as a basis for measuring inequality in the distribution of economic and well-being. The empirical results illustrate how incomes vary significantly with age according to labour market attachment and experience, educational attainment and occupation, transfer receipts, and investment benefits. Similarly, strong age effects on net worth account reflect life-cycle patterns in asset holdings and debts typically associated with family investment in housing and financial adjustments for retirement. Differences in family size and composition have a substantial effect on the structure of family economic well-being. The inequality effects of adjusting for accrued capital gains and net worth holdings can also be quite significant. It is found that the distributional effects of CPP net benefits are considerable, although they are not as equalizing as one may have expected because of marked cohort effects. The detailed findings suggest that the life-cycle framework is a very useful one for evaluating the distributional effects of certain government programs, particularly intertemporal ones, and they underline the need for a range of different types of policies to address low income problems. The study urges greater recognition of the inequality of treatment and opportunity among different groups of the population. It also points out that conventional income distribution figures are only very imperfect estimates of the state of inequality in the underlying distribution of economic well-being.
This detailed and informative study makes a timely contribution to a subject that has been the focus of much public discussion and debate in Ontario and elsewhere, namely the size and growth of the public sector. Working with the Public Accounts and other sources, Professor Foot offers both an historical account of, and an explanation for, the growth of provincial revenues and expenditures since the early 1950s. By concentrating on an analysis of the development of a single government over time, rather than adopting the traditional cross-section approach of analysing a number of junior-level governments. The study's conclusions are both informative and provocative. On the revenue side, a rate-base approach which separates discretionary from automatic changes in revenue determinants is shown to provide sufficient flexibility to accommodate the analysis and explanation of a wide range of specific revenues. On the expenditure side, the provincial government is found to adjust reasonably slowly to new levels of desired expenditures which appear to be determined primarily by demand variables. Of particular interest are findings which suggest that urbanization and elections have had little effect on expenditures and that available federal money has tended to be a substitute for provincial funds. In addition, the author notes that provincial expenditure patterns are consistent with either a revenue-led interpretation, where the recent availability of pension funds has stimulated expenditures, or a leading-sector interpretation, which implies a longer-run coordinated view of provincial public development. This study should stimulate a more informed discussion of the determinants and effects of provincial public finance in Ontario. It will appeal not only to those interested in the behaviour of junior-level governments but also to anyone interested in the size and growth of the public sector, in Ontario or elsewhere.