While governments struggle to find consensus in the lead-up to the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) critical ministerial conference (MC12) in November, there is a highly significant global development that won’t even be touched on at the meeting: the spread of trade embargoes and economic sanctions.
Used mostly by Western governments, these tools are aimed at combatting terrorism, preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, penalizing human rights abuses and environmental degradation, fighting drug trafficking and other actions by unsavoury foreign governments, companies and individuals.
In today’s fraught and increasingly fractured world order, with reduced efficacy of multilaterally-agreed rules, unilateral…
Big changes are afoot in the way patent drugs are priced in Canada. At present, Canada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), a federal agency, is responsible for setting maximum prices for patented drugs (i.e., pharmaceuticals, biologics and vaccines). The agency has been criticized for failing to rein in prices, which are higher than in some peer countries. This criticism is unfair: the tools the PMPRB was given to regulate drug prices when it was established in 1987 have become less effective over time.
To address this problem, the federal government has authorized the PMPRB to introduce new pricing regulations, now scheduled to come into force in January. We think this is the wrong strategy. Instead of relying on…
Earlier this month, the Bank of Canada left its target for the overnight interest rate at 25 basis points while maintaining the pace of its quantitative easing (QE) program by continuing to purchase Government of Canada debt at a rate of $2 billion per week. Markets widely expected that: any major change to tighten or ease monetary policy in the middle of an election campaign might have been interpreted as a political statement. But with the economy stalling, inflation spiking (headline inflation was 4.1 per cent in August) and federal government stimulus not ending soon, what is next for monetary policy?
We are at an interesting point on the path of pandemic inflation. One perspective thinks it’s on track. As of July,…
