Bloated Bureaucrats or Underappreciated Public Servants? How do Public and Private Sector Wages Compare in Alberta?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A year before the United Conservation Party was elected in Alberta, the final budget from the NDP government allocated some $21.6 billion to public sector salaries, wages and benefits, or 38.4 percent of the total expenditures of $56.2 billion (government of Alberta 2018). The same budget estimated a deficit of $8.8 billion.[1] With the general distaste in Alberta for budget deficits, coupled with current low energy revenues and the political improbability of introducing a sales tax as a steady and predictable revenue stream, the province is left with few options to reduce the budgetary shortfall and to keep the debt‐GDP ratio from increasing. If revenues cannot be enhanced, then expenditures must be controlled to reduce any budgetary shortfall. The fact that public‐sector earnings comprise such a large expenditure item means that this compensation is an obvious target for any expenditure‐reduction exercise. The fact that so many Albertans have recently lost lucrative employment in the private sector, while the public sector has remained relatively unscathed, has left public sector workers as obvious targets in any cost‐cutting exercise. In short, many Albertans are demanding that they receive value for their tax dollars when it comes to the provision of public services, and with public sector compensation such a large line item in the budget, it is inevitable that this compensation will be scrutinized. [1] The estimated deficit has since decreased to $6.9 billion (Government of Alberta 2019).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".