Economic growth is not a mysterious force that strikes unpredictably or whose absence is inexplicable, according to Fred McMahon, Road to Growth. McMahon's book shows that successful economies maintain moderate costs, particularly labour costs and taxes. That leaves room for healthy profits, which in turn attract and fund further investment.
The Nova Scotia Government's program review has attracted a great deal of criticism, much of it attacking the premise on which program review is based. In The Sunday Herald, AIMS President Brian Lee Crowley reviews the case for program review and concludes that the arguments for it remain compelling. Not only do the province’s finances need to be put on a sustainable course, but ensuring that Nova Scotians get good value for public spending is indispensable for future prosperity.
Professor Peter Aucoin, one of this country's most distinguished scholars on public administration, has written a special piece exclusively for AIMS on the necessity of strengthening the civil service if Nova Scotia is to improve the quality of public policy and governance in the province. Professor Aucoin's analysis, which draws on innovative civil service reforms in other countries as well as elsewhere in Canada, should be mandatory reading for all those involved in the public sector restructuring that balancing the provincial budget will require.
Denotes the second best fiscal performance in Atlantic Canada
Is Brian Tobin a fiscal conservative? The idea that a premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, the poorest province in the land, is actually a careful and prudent manager of tax dollars may appear hard to swallow to many people in the rest of the country. Rightly or wrongly, people often picture the Newfoundland government as always having its hand out, bemoaning the province's victimization by outside forces, unwilling to take charge of its own fate. Yet the truth is rather different.
In December of 1999 AIMS made this submission to the Nova Scotia Fiscal Management Task Force. Getting Back to Basics examines how without serious structural changes to the way that programs are provided in Nova Scotia, the government will progressively lose its ability to deliver programs and its political decision making power.
Premier Pat Binns will receive today the coveted AIMS Golden Piggy Bank Award
AIMS benchmark report on the Atlantic provinces debt accumulation.
Economic growth and fiscal discipline have slightly reduced the region’s burden but debt is now a record $27-billion or $11,400 for every Atlantic Canadian