Canada is still unprepared for aging double whammy
If we were the only country on Earth, productivity would still be the most important economic challenge facing Canada today. A decade or so ago, politicians were fond of talking about the issue in terms of national `competitiveness,` a matter of our`n beating their`n.
But this is nonsense. Competition takes place at the level of the firm, not the country. Every country is `competitive` in something, by definition: if comparative advantage were not enough to see to that (even if China were better than us at everything, it would still pay them to specialize at the things they are `most best` at, and leave the rest to us), a floating dollar would. Worse, the `competitiveness` frame, and the sporting metaphors to which it lent itself (`national champions,` Team Canada, etc), encouraged all sorts of bogus solutions, from industrial subsidies to foreign investment controls, that have served us ill.
Read the full article
here.