"Sin taxes," as they are known, are taxes that are levied on a certain number of products that governments consider harmful like alcohol, tobacco, gambling and certain foods that are high in sugar or fat. In 2012, the average Canadian family paid 5.3% of its total contributions to government in the form of taxes on alcohol, tobacco, entertainment and other excise taxes.

Bitcoin digital currency has attracted the regular attention of the financial press for the past several months. Its price fluctuates enormously, influenced by new innovative developments but also by positive or negative decisions by governments and central banks concerning its use. Is the Bitcoin system here to stay and become an integral part of our economic lives? Whatever the outcome of this particular experiment, the innovations made possible by new information technology have the potential to revolutionize monetary and financial matters.

Quebec is one of the provinces in which private medicine has developed rapidly in recent years. This trend coincides with a large number of Quebecers being unable to find a family doctor and with lengthening wait times both for undergoing treatment after a diagnosis and for being seen by a doctor in a hospital emergency room. How many private clinics are there, and how many doctors have left the public system in Quebec? Why do patients resort to private medicine?

Hong Kong today is a doorway to China and the rest of Asia for foreign investors, and one of the wealthiest societies in the world. Its gross domestic product per capita is even higher than Britain's. And yet, after the Second World War, this minuscule territory of the British Empire, devoid of natural resources, was faced with the problems of a developing country, with a rapidly expanding poor population. In 1960, the average income per capita was still just 28% of what residents of the far-off mother country earned at the time.

Many workers, particularly the young and immigrants, have a hard time finding a job, especially a full-time job. At the same time, many companies in various sectors struggle to fill certain positions. This seemingly paradoxical situation stems from the difficulty of achieving a perfect match between job seekers and available jobs. What is called the flexibility of the labour market represents an excellent solution to this problem, for both employees and employers.

International aid only has a limited impact on the fight against poverty, as opposed to trade and entrepreneurial capitalism. Meanwhile, international bureaucrats are still busy crafting new taxes for development assistance. In 2000, the United Nations Development Programme started talking about Innovative Financing for Development (IFD), a complex set of spending projects and organizations in the field of development assistance that are to be funded mostly by new taxes.

Since the adoption of a law to that effect in 1917, the debt of the American federal government is subject to a “ceiling.” Barring an agreement from Congress, the current ceiling should be reached during the month of October. This is a structural problem, not a cyclical one. Even if we managed to balance revenue and spending and eliminate budget deficits, it would not spell the end of the basic imbalance in American government finances, which is due to the ever-growing financial obligations stemming from social programs.

With the explosive growth of the Internet and Canadians' expanding use of it, questions about privacy protection are increasingly taking centre stage in public debates. It is essential, though, to distinguish between the protection we might hope for from the organs of government and the regulations that apply to private companies with which we transact freely for products and services of our choosing. Even if protecting personal information is an issue in both cases, the dynamic is not the same. It is the latter subject that concerns us in this Economic Note.

Filling up at the gas station represents only 43% of the oil we use. In fact, hydrocarbon by-products are all around us and shape our daily lives: telephones, ballpoint pens, clothing made from synthetic fibres, toothpaste… The city's petrochemical sector, which provides 3,600 quality jobs, is heavily reliant on a steady supply of affordable hydrocarbons. This is exactly what the Western provinces have to offer.

Invoking “obvious economic reasons,” i.e., annual savings of $24 million, the Quebec government cancelled six small hydroelectric power projects this past February. In April, however, it announced new supply contracts for wind power, a sector that is already guaranteed to receive an implicit subsidy of $695 million a year until 2020. For Youri Chassin, economist at the MEI and the author of this Economic Note, we have an urgent need for rational decisions based on our actual energy requirements and not on artificial support of various energy sectors.