The Atlantic Institute for Market Studies today released its updated 1998 demographic study for the Atlantic provinces.
Not surprisingly they confirmed the demographics trends for this province over the next three decades that have been known publicly since the early to mid-1990s in this province.
“While slower growth and aging affect the labour force, and hence a region’s ability to generate output and income, they also affect virtually all other aspects of the economy. They affect patterns of saving and household consumption, and hence investment. They have differential effects on sales, production, and investment levels in different industries, and their impact thus falls unevenly on different areas within a region. They affect the tax bases from which provincial governments must draw revenue, and they affect the demands for government program expenditures. Work carried out in other contexts suggests the feasibility and importance of anticipating the effects of population change on government expenditures.”
Those trends and the financial implications for government are nothing new for regular Bond Papers readers.
This sort of information is one of the reasons why this corner of the Intern long ago branded government spending as unsound and unsustainable.
It just took them three years to figure it out.