Fiscal Restraint and Subsidies to Businesses: Regional Dimensions *. (Research Notes/Notes De Recherche)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
'Fiscal Restraint and Subsidies to Business: Regional Dimensions.' This paper analyses the changes in government subsidies to business during the 1992 to 1998 period. The distribution of federal subsidies by province suggests that federal subsidies were not a factor in explaning different performances of regional economies in Canada during this period. [much less than] Les restrictions fiscales et les subventions aux entreprises : dimensions regionales.[much greater than] Dans cette article, les changements des subventions gouvernementales aux entreprises ont ete analyse pendant la periode 1992 a 1998. La distribution des subventions du gouvernement federal entre les provinces suggere que ces subventinos n'ont pas ete un facteur cle pour expliquer les performances differentes des regions diverses du Canada pendant cette periode. ********** The 1990s witnessed a dramatic turnaround in the fiscal position of federal and provincial governments m Canada. The federal government built a fiscal structure that eliminated the budget deficit and is capable, in the absence of discretionary policies, of generating large and increasing surpluses over time. Provincial governments also stabilised their fiscal systems and were successful in moving towards balanced budgets. This fiscal re-structuring involved changes to both taxation and government spending. This paper focuses on one special component of government spending, subsidies to businesses. Government subsidies to businesses been criticised on various grounds. They are viewed as government interference in the operation of the free markets that leads to distortions of private choices and the mis-allocation of resources. Some authors argued that the distortions generated by subsidies when used for regional development policy may been harmful to the economies of the less affluent provinces and retarded the process of convergence. The issues arising from the efficiency effects of subsidies are not discussed in this paper. The focus of this paper, instead, is an evaluation of the pattern of government subsidies during the period of fiscal restraint from 1992 to 1998. Its main purpose is to answer the following questions: - To what extent did fiscal restraint by federal and provincial-local governments, separately and in total, affect the level of subsidies to businesses? - Did fiscal restraint reduce inter-provincial differences in subsidies? - Did fiscal restraint affect the relative amount of subsidies received by businesses in the three richest (have) provinces and the equalisation-receiving (have-not) provinces? The answers to the above questions will provide some insights into the changes in government policies aimed at regional disparities, and delivered through government subsidies to businesses, brought about by fiscal restraint. The paper is organised as follows. First, the methodology is discussed. Then, some basic information on the level of subsidies provided by federal and provincial-local governments during the 1992-98 period is presented. Following this, the changes in the inter-provincial variation in indicators of subsidies that occurred during the 1992-98 period and the changes in the relationship between have and have-not provinces are evaluated. The final section contains some concluding remarks. Methodological Issues Definition Business enterprises receive assistance from government through two main channels: (a) direct cash payments, and (b) indirect assistance through vehicles such as forgivable loans, loan guarantees, technical assistance, and preferential tax treatment in the personal and corporate income tax systems (tax expenditures). This paper focuses on the first component only. Data on government subsidies are found in Statistics Canada's Provincial Economic Accounts (PEA). …
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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 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".