bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The National Accounts: Whither Now?
Authors: Goldberg S. A. , Leacy F. H. 
Published: June 2006

Ten years ago, almost to the day, a memorandum describing the conceptual framework of Canada's National Accounts was presented at a special session of the annual meeting of this Association held in Kingston and its substance appeared soon afterwards as chapter 1 of the first of the series of publications on the National Accounts, Income and Expenditure issued by the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. The present occasion therefore marks the tenth anniversary of Canada's National Accounts, and it seems appropriate to commemorate it with something of a stock-taking and a glimpse into the future. We have been prompted to undertake this task not merely by reasons of sentiment but primarily by a very practical consideration. For various reasons noted below, the Bureau is commencing work on a revised volume of the National Accounts which it plans to release two years from now. We hope that the present discussion will help to make this document as useful as possible by promoting a cross-fertilization of ideas between the users and producers of the data.However, not all the matters discussed here will be incorporated in the forthcoming volume. Indeed much of the work in progress described here is developmental and will take many years to complete. Furthermore, some matters to be discussed are still speculative and hypothetical, introduced primarily to illustrate interesting possibilities which may or may not take the form of published statistical series. It is difficult to draw the line clearly or with confidence in all cases but we hope that, in general, it will appear from the context which parts are likely to be included in the forthcoming report, which parts represent developmental work that eventually will see the light of day, and which parts have a more uncertain fate.
Delegated Legislation in Canada: Recent Changes in Machinery
Authors: Mallory J. R. 
Published: June 2006

Few today would deny the necessity for subordinate legislation. The true business of Parliament remains the debate over the major principles of policy, but Parliament has neither the technical skill nor the time to process the mass of detailed regulation. Nevertheless, even with a sound division of function between Parliament and the departmental sources of delegated legislation, a serious problem remains. The initiative in the framing of public policy has passed to the bureaucracy, and machinery is required to ensure that bureaucratic legislation may receive the same debate, criticism, and review as ordinary legislation. The objective of administrative reform has been to safeguard the public against bureaucratic tyranny by three devices: (a) systematic publication of subordinate legislation; (b) opportunity for parliamentary review; and (c) continuance of judicial review of the scope of delegated authority.In the United Kingdom, where these matters are more highly developed than under any other parliamentary system, the first two of these requirements are met by the Statutory Instruments Act, 1946, by various Statutory Instruments Regulations made thereunder, by the activity of the House of Commons Select Committee on Statutory Instruments, and through various techniques of parliamentary review.
Consumption Levels in Canada and the United States, 1947-50
Authors: Due Jean Mann 
Published: June 2006

Measures of levels of consumption in various countries are useful not only as means of comparing the utilization of goods and services in the countries concerned but also as partial indicators of the relative levels of welfare and of production in those countries. These indicators are particularly useful in international economic relations for determining contributions to mutual defence, and to the various United Nations organizations. Although the usefulness of these measures is recognized, agreement as to the best method of obtaining these measures has not been reached.Canada and the United States were chosen for this methodological study of international levels of consumption because of the similarity of modes of living, institutions, economic systems, age and sex distributions of the population, sizes of family, and habits of consumption in the two countries. In addition the author is familiar with both countries and most of the necessary data were available. The study was confined to the period 1947 to 1950 because a series of years is more reliable for purposes of comparison than a single year in this post-war period, and because data for more recent years were not available when the methodology was tested.A comparison of per capita national and personal incomes in Canada and the United States during the period indicated that Canadian incomes were approximately 66 per cent of American incomes. Average family incomes in the two countries were in about the same relationship; the average Canadian family received $2,233 and the average American family $3,187 in 1948. What, then, was the relative level of consumption in the two countries?
The Efficiency of Competition as an Allocator of Resources: II. External Economies of Consumption
Authors: Kemp Murray C. 
Published: June 2006

Economists have long been aware of the interdependence of the consumption and the consumption plans of individuals. For the most part they have been interested in the implications of this interdependence for the theory of market behaviour rather than in its implications for welfare. The purpose of this article is to give a detailed diagrammatic treatment of the welfare implications of external economies and diseconomies of consumption. In particular, we shall discuss the fiscal measures which, in a competitive economy, would provide the incentives necessary to the attainment of an optimal allocation of resources.We shall distinguish from each other, and consider separately, three types of interdependence of consumption and consumption plans.(i) The consumption of a particular commodity X by a particular individual A may increase (decrease) the satisfactions of other individuals, that is, generate external economies (diseconomies).(ii) The consumption of a particular commodity X may change the satisfactions of other individuals independently of the identity of the consumer.(iii) The receipt of money income by a particular individual A may, independently of his manner of disposal of the income, change the satisfactions of other individuals.No doubt this classification is not exhaustive. Thus no place is found for various external repercussions of consumption which might be discussed in a dynamic model, that is, in a model permitting instability of preference maps. Even in static models a place could be found for types of interdependence not discussed here. Many of these excluded types, however, can be described as combinations of those already enumerated (for example, a particular act of consumption may lower the satisfaction of some, raise that of other individuals) and can be treated by the techniques to be developed for their analysis.
The Ideas of Henri Bourassa
Authors: O'Connell M. P. 
Published: June 2006

The purpose of this paper is to sketch briefly some aspects of Bourassa's political and social thought and to indicate in particular a few of the influences shaping his complex mentality. With the historical detail of his public career, and of the Nationalist movement which he led in the first two decades of this century, the paper is not directly concerned. Nor is any attempt made to reach a final estimate of his influence or significance in Canadian politics.The difficulties in examining Bourassa's ideas are many and arise not only from his radical temperament and tendency to over-statement. They spring also from his great sensitivity to the intellectual and emotional currents of his day which found expression in innumerable pamphlets, speeches, and editorials in his newspaper of ideas and combat, Le Devoir, founded in 1910. Difficulties are implicit in the complicated nature of the task he sought to perform. For he set out, at the turn of the century, and with a sense of the opening of a new era in the historic development of the French-Canadian people, to re-examine every aspect of his people's situation; political, social, economic, moral, religious, and intellectual. He proposed to expound principles basic to their social thought and action in a new set of circumstances.Three main elements in the new era were of special concern. First was the impact upon Canada of the new imperialism, opening up prospects of direct involvement in imperial wars in an age of mounting imperial rivalries, and threatening, moreover, so he believed, to undermine toleration of cultural and ethnic difference in Canada. A second major change in circumstance was the rapid development after 1900 of the Canadian West on the basis of a large immigrant population of diverse peoples, posing grave difficulties to the achievement of the ideal of a dual nationality throughout Canada. Finally, he became much concerned with the deeper significance to French-Canadian nationality of the whole complex of adaptations—ideological, moral, economic, and social—being made in response to the coming of North American urban industrialism to the province of Quebec.
Adolescent Bureaucracy: Some Features of the Canadian Civil Service before Confederation
Authors: Hodgetts J. E. 
Published: June 2006

The poet Thomas Gray certainly did not have civil servants in mind when he penned the lines:
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; …Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,If Mem'ry o'er their tomb no trophies raise.Nevertheless, his words seem to be a most fitting epitaph for those public servants who lived between 1840 and 1867 in the United Canadas. Our historians and sculptors have rescued most of our leading politicians from oblivion, but a great web of silence has been woven around the personalities and labours of our bureaucrats. It will be argued in this paper that this silence is quite unjustified. It will be argued further that this neglect of the civil service by our historians has resulted in the presentation of an incomplete picture of the attainment of responsible government in Canada. A third set of observations deals with the shadowy area dividing administration from politics, that is, dividing the ministerial head from his highest permanent advisers. Obviously this selection of topics is not designed to provide a comprehensive and complete survey of the state of our public services before Confederation. What follows is, rather, a series of impressions, deliberately undocumented, which are advanced as a basis for subsequent discussion.
The Formative Years of the House of Commons, 1867–91
Authors: Ward Norman 
Published: June 2006

The practice of criticizing political institutions on the basis of their efficiency as pieces of machinery is so widespread in political science today that it is sometimes difficult to remember that institutions may be as important for what they are as for what they do. An elected legislature, in its scrutiny of governmental affairs, not only represents the dominant sections of the electorate that returned it; it also reveals, through the nature of its own organization, their attitudes towards the elected legislature and its place in their society. An appraisal of the capacities and incapacities of a legislature would be at best incomplete if it paid no attention to the beliefs and traditions reflected therein, for it would ignore the obvious truth that the quality of the legislature's work was conditioned by its social environment. In the paragraphs that follow, the emphasis is not upon performance, although that is not overlooked, but upon the legislature as a social entity, as a mirror in which one can see an important part of a community.The Canadian House of Commons during its early years offered the unusual and interesting spectacle of a legislature engaged in threshing out great issues while the legislative machinery itself was still under construction. Debates on important matters concerning the country at large ran parallel with acrimonious discussions about the nature and function of the House of Commons and its organization, and the government frequently tried (by providing, for instance, that each province was to obtain its due proportion of Commons' clerkships) to make the House a significant factor in the settling of disputes. Many institutions of the House (the speakership, the Hansard, and the Library, to name but a few) took their initial form as a result of forces which often bore little relation to legislation and debate.
An Analysis of Multiple-Employer Collective Bargaining Based on Three Case Studies
Authors: Eastman Sheila MacQueen 
Published: June 2006

Multiple-employer collective bargaining includes all systems of bargaining in which representatives of a number of separate firms act as a group in negotiating with representatives of their workers. The group negotiations need not cover the whole content of the contracts signed by the participating companies, nor does the group action necessarily extend from negotiation to administration of the collective bargaining contract. The employers' bargaining unit may be of any size. Industry-wide bargaining is only one form of multiple-employer bargaining; characteristics of multiple-employer bargaining are also present, although sometimes less pronounced, in local or district bargaining systems.A significant proportion of the collective bargaining systems in Canada are organized on a multiple-employer basis. The Department of Labour estimated that in 1946, 26 per cent of all workers under collective agreements were covered by agreements negotiated by associations or groups of employers. The ratio would be 46 per cent if workers covered by agreements extended under the Collective Agreement Act of Quebec were included. The relative importance of multiple-employer collective bargaining is probably much the same today.
Marxist Theory and Scientific Methods
Authors: Mayo H. B. 
Published: June 2006

Many social theories have been called scientific, but no one has insisted more than Marx on the scientific nature of his system of thought. It is the purpose of this article to examine the ambitious claim of Marxism to be the only real science of society. Dialectical materialism may be omitted from consideration since it concerns not science but philosophy (or even metaphysics), and in any case it is the Marxist social theory, or historical materialism, for which the claim of science is most insistently made.There is no need to give here the details of Marx's historical materialism. The main point to be kept in mind is Marx's assumption, lying behind the entire body of his theory, that history and society move according to a pattern of knowable laws, the so-called “laws of motion” of society; and that Marx claims to have done nothing more than to have laid bare these laws. If Marx is right he obviously ranks as the greatest social scientist of all time. If he is not right he is a misguided and fanatical genius who has led man's thought up a long blind alley.A preliminary word on the application of scientific methods to the study of society may not be out of place. The purposes of study, whether in the natural or social sciences, are the same: to explain how, to accomplish a practical result, or to predict. These three criteria may also be used to test a scientific theory. There are of course certain special difficulties in the social sciences, difficulties arising (to select from many reasons) because of the nature of the data, or because inference may so easily be confused with fact, or because merely studying the behaviour of people and publishing the results may affect the very behaviour being studied.
Social Credit Measures in Alberta
Authors: Whalen Hugh 
Published: June 2006

The economic theory implied by the terms “New Economics,” “Douglasism,” and “Social Credit” rests on the plea that the present economic system is inherently defective; that capitalism has a “mechanical” flaw which assures in any given period a flow of purchasing power almost always less than the flow of prices. As a consequence there is a surplus of goods; a surplus, that is, only in relation to consumers' capacity to purchase and not in their capacity to consume. Major Douglas asserts that the deficiency of purchasing power is not periodic or accidental, but is chronic and ever present. He attributes the cause of the deficiency to the following factors: first, current banking practice which permits private banks to create and destroy credit at will; second, the process of saving and investment; and third, the difference of “circuit velocity between cost liquidation and price creation” which results in charges being carried over into prices from a previous cost-accountancy cycle. It has been pointed out repeatedly that each of these assumptions is of questionable validity.In logical sequence to the hypothesis that capitalism produces a surplus of goods which consumers cannot purchase, Social Credit proposals for reform are designed to inject purchasing power into the consumption stream: in a word, to make consumption equal production. This can be achieved, it is stated, by introducing a “just-price” mechanism and by augmenting personal incomes through the issuance of “national dividends.” The “just” or “assisted price” is conceived as an arithmetic ratio (total national consumption over total national production) which is to be the means of deciding, from time to time, in what proportion the retail price level will be reduced.
The Fundamentals of the New Italian Constitution
Authors: Tesauro Alfonso 
Published: June 2006

The present Italian Constitution may be said to have its origin in the adoption of the republican form of government by the referendum held in June, 1946. Its basic features are embodied in the Charter constructed by the Constitutional Assembly then elected and are designed to establish a firm foundation for the organization and life of the Italian state as well as of its citizens. The Constitution is the true expression of the popular will since exponents of the various political creeds co-operated in framing the fundamental laws and practices that are to govern the operation of the Italian state, independently of political fluctuations. Its preservation is entrusted not to the citizens or to their representatives but to the Constitutional Court which it provides for.In the new Constitution, Italy remains a unitary state. However, the structure of the state has undergone a change since the nineteen regions, which under the monarchy were only geographical divisions, have now been given constitutional autonomy in local matters. Thus within the state we now find the following territorial subdivisions: the regions, the provinces, and the communes.The autonomy of the regions is local in the sense that their jurisdiction does not extend beyond their respective boundaries and is confined to the promotion of local interests. Their legislative function is restricted by the Constitution (article 117) to matters such as the boundaries of the communes, local urban and rural police, public fairs and markets, public welfare agencies, medical aid and hospitalization, trade schools and other special schools, provisions for school aid, local museums and libraries, tourist trade, public means of transportation such as street cars and bus lines, public works of regional interest such as the improvement of lake ports, highways, roads, and aqueducts. The regions are required to make provisions for securing obedience to state laws. The Italian state can assign other administrative functions to the regions. All matters of general interest, such as those which relate to the administration of justice, to the relations of citizens to the Italian state, and to administrative functions of a general character, fall within the province of the Italian state legislature.
Resale Price Maintenance in Great Britain
Authors: Skeoch L. A. 
Published: June 2006

This, one of the extremely limited number of full-length studies devoted exclusively to resale price maintenance in Great Britain, is a doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Amsterdam. The author, apparently trained in economics at British universities, also claims a “connection with the trade in branded consumer goods” lasting “for a number of years.” In his introduction, Dr. Kuipers expresses particular dissatisfaction with the theoretical analyses advanced by British economists, which, he claims, are inadequately supported by “facts.” His own analysis he believes to be sufficiently comprehensive to enable him to derive a formula, “the adoption of which … would provide an adequate solution to the problem [of resale price maintenance] in Great Britain under present conditions” (p. 3). The degree to which other economists will recognize this ambitious claim will depend on whether they accept Kuipers' analysis of what “the problem” of resale price maintenance is and, for those who do, whether they also believe that his particular scheme is desirable and administratively feasible.The volume is divided into two parts: the first deals in a general way with the legal and economic aspects of resale price maintenance in Great Britain and lays the basis for Dr. Kuipers' policy recommendations; the second part deals with the nature and extent of price maintenance in the British grocery trade. Although more than one hundred pages are devoted to the latter section, the empirical data upon which the statistical analysis is based are very sketchy. Dr. Kuipers is not unaware of this weakness but he considers the results “generally accurate” and “sufficiently near the mark.” Whether or not one agrees with this assessment, there can be little question that Dr. Kuipers has achieved as much as an individual investigator, working unassisted, could hope to do.
British Demand for New Zealand's Exports
Authors: Lerdau E. 
Published: June 2006

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Primarily it is an attempt to isolate some of the structural parameters governing New Zealand's balance of trade during the inter-war period. A secondary end, a by-product of the first, is to throw some light on the controversy between “elasticity pessimists” and “elasticity optimists.” Born out of very real problems concerning monetary policy on the international level, and carried on by some of the most acute and productive minds among economists, this controversy has, I believe, been in general a good and highly fruitful one. If any criticism is to be made, it must be methodological, and concern itself with the statistical procedures used by one side, and the tendency of the other side toward a priori refutation instead of empirical investigation. I also believe that, while the statistical data are highly imperfect, the best possible use has not been made of what data exist, and that at this stage only more, and more carefully weighted, evidence can help us on. The present investigation offers only a little of the great amount of such evidence which is needed.Following a few theoretical remarks, three commodities—butter, lamb, and cheese—will be studied, in order to increase our information about New Zealand's trade balance. Only their behaviour in the United Kingdom market is analysed. This procedure immediately raises the question: how important are these goods as part of New Zealand's exports and how important is the United Kingdom market? The answer is that up to 1929 the sale of these three products in the United Kingdom made up about one-half of New Zealand's export receipts. Had wool been included, this proportion would have risen to about 70 per cent. After 1929 it declined somewhat, but never fell below 40 per cent. From this it seems to follow that whatever determines the demand in the United Kingdom for these three products affects significantly but not overwhelmingly New Zealand's balance of trade on the export side.