There was a wonderful opinion piece by Kevin Libin in this Saturday’s National Post about the bulging Canadian bureaucracy and what it means for our country.
The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger recently put out an intriguing theory to explain why Egypt was such an economic basket case — with unemployment and food inflation fuelling in large part the political instability there — while Turkey, another profoundly Islamic country, has seen its economy flourish. Look at the size of the public sector, he says: in Egypt, the percentage of people working for the government is 35%; in Turkey, it’s 13%. There is, he points out, “a striking correlation between economic success in emerging economies and relatively low populations of public employees, notably in Asia.” The strong performers of Korea, India, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand and China have small public sectors relative to their population, while moribund economies breed university grads for the state bureaucracies that provide some measure of job security, buying regimes some stability. “Past some tipping point of a population employed by the state, an economy starts to choke,” Henninger writes. With more than 20% of Canadians now working in our public sector, and rising, it’s worth asking where, exactly, our own tipping point is.
This week, Statistics Canada released new numbers of public sector growth that showed that beginning in mid-2005, right before the Conservatives were elected, the growth in public sector jobs outpaced the growth of Canada’s population, after four years of lagging below the general population growth rate. And starting in 2008, that rate really began to soar, and it hasn’t stopped since. One of the biggest culprits in the last two years has undoubtedly been the Conservatives’ stimulus plan, notes Jack Mintz, the economist and chair of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.
Those Stats Can numbers can be found here:
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/110222/dq110222b-eng.htm
Read Kevin Libin’s column in full here:
http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/bureaucracy/4351326/story.html
