The latest from Mowat in our ongoing Shifting Gears research partnership with KPMG, this study looks at the growing global trend toward outcomes-based program funding in an era marked by fiscal restraint and rising expectations for accountability and effectiveness. The paper studies the challenges facing governments that seek to extend an outcomes-based model to highly complex program areas like criminal justice and child and family welfare.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican U.S. Representative Paul Ryan proposed a new way to help poor Americans on Thursday with a plan to allow charities, community groups and even for-profit firms to compete
In late July, the Social Innovation Fund, a new $50 million federal program aimed at financing the replication of nonprofit programs that work, made its first grants.
The NFP Experience with Social Impact Bonds
Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) are a new funding tool that uses private capital to fund preventative social interventions. A new idea generating high levels of excitement and controversy, advocates see SIBs as a vehicle for innovation, while critics fear that they will be used by government to offload social spending. In fact, it is still early days and the evidence is not yet available to determine their success, failure, threat or promise. This Sector Signal looks at the early experiences of NFP service providers in SIBs and examines challenges and opportunities of the model.
We will launch a Social Impact Bond pilot program, allowing community groups to bid to make the greatest impact upon fighting poverty and to fuel sustainability of the organizations that work to improve people’s lives.There will be no financial consequences for the province.
The University of Utah's James Lee Sorenson Center for Global Impact Investing has been awarded a $1.15 million grant by the Corporation for National and Community Service to create a "Pay for Success
Board of Education member Henry Bienen took an unusual step at last month’s meeting: He voted against a plan that came down from Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office.
The city is about to enter into a $30 million agreement with several Wall Street lenders to finance an early education program that will allow banks to profit off the educational success of children.
The commercial director of the children's charity says it's wrong to compel charities to sign up to social investment schemes as a condition in a contract or programme
“Under Mayor Emanuel, $16.6 million in ‘social impact bonds’ from Goldman Sachs will cost taxpayers more than double the amount borrowed. The money used to pay the interest and multimillion-dollar fees will come from property tax dollars that would have otherwise gone to schools and further mortgage our children’s future,” Garcia said.
Ontario should reform its tax policies in its upcoming budget to let private sector investors and individual municipalities make decisions about mergers and size
Message from the Chair December 2012 In April 2012, the Ontario Minister of Energy established the Ontario Distribution Sector Review Panel to provide expert advice to the government on how to improve efficiencies in the sector with the aim of reducing the financial...
This guide gives an overview of the privatization, contracting out and contracting in issues CUPE members face – along with sample collective agreement language for local bargaining committees, bargaining councils and staff representatives. Privatizing jobs and services hurts members and the community, as workers’ living standards decline and well-paying jobs disappear. Our first line of defence against privatization is our union contract, negotiated through collective bargaining.
The 10-storey, 680,000 square foot state-of-the-art facility has 404 patient beds in rooms designed to accommodate the latest equipment, provide natural light, and organized to facilitate the best patient care. Each floor has shared dining rooms, activity rooms and patient lounges to encourage social interaction and participation. In planning for the future of healthcare, we have also ensured that the design is to be adaptable for future changes.
On April 1, the Saskatchewan government announced that June Draude was appointed the legislative secretary responsible for expanding social impact bonds (SIB). I only wish this had been an April Fool's Day joke.
Unfortunately, the Wall government has decided to develop a casino approach to social programs. Instead of simply funding worthy social projects, the government will hand the financing over to private investors who will get paid back in full and with interest at the end of the project. The two investors in the first SIB in Saskatoon are set to earn five-per-cent interest on their investment - that's better than any rates the banks are offering.
On April 14, 2014, PPP Canada opened up its application process for the sixth round of the P3 Canada Fund. The federal government has committed $1.25 billion in funds to this program and to qualifying projects and municipalities.
Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) as a vehicle for funding social change are gaining renewed momentum right now as U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Michael Bennet (D- Colorado) have crafted legislation to appropriate $300 million for state and local social-impact bonds over 10 years.
The federal government's plan to help the private sector fund the public sector with 'social impact bonds' appeals to some cash-strapped social service agencies but worries others.
Pursuant to its mandate under Standing Order 108(2), the Committee has studied Exploring the Potential of Social Finance in Canada and has agreed to report the following.
A new study by the Parkland Institute details the devastation to
Alberta's social services sector following decades of experimentation by
the provincial Tories. The main goal of many of these initiatives was to
cut government spending on social welfare and offload provision to
anyone willing to take them on – for-profit and not-for-profit
organizations alike.
A New York City program aimed at cutting recidivism rates among Rikers Island adolescent prison inmates failed to meet its desired goal. As a result, the city paid nothing for it.
Results from the first generation of social impact bonds (also known as pay for success deals) are starting to come in. Today, the field has learned the results of the evaluation of the first social impact bond transaction in the United States.
Goldman Sachs' move to buy San Francisco-based Imprint Capital has the small community of impact investment asset managers and dealmakers buzzing about who might next be asked to dance by a Wall Street suitor.
Social impact bonds funnel private capital into philanthropic projects. Investors receive a return based on whether the project saves public money by addressing the social issue it targets.
This paper shows how Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) serve to expand privatization in areas of social reproduction and care work. SIBs extend neoliberalism and austerity in the social care sector through the financialization of care work. They open these domains as a new frontier for investment markets, creating inequity for already marginalized groups. The paper concludes with an overview of the SIB landscape in Canada and explores its possibilities for growth.
During the initial shock from COVID-19, it was understandable that governments and central banks would respond with massive injections of liquidity. But now policymakers need to take a step back and consider which forms of stimulus are really needed, and which risk doing more harm than good.
The OECD Economic Outlook is the OECD's twice-yearly analysis of the major economic trends and prospects for the next two years. This issue includes a general assessment of the macroeconomic situation, a series of notes on the macroeconomic and structural policy issues related to the COVID-19 outbreak and a chapter summarising developments and providing projections for each individual country.
In a recent World Economic Forum (WEF) virtual meeting, the ageing heir to the British monarchy, Prince Charles spoke with IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva. Charles’s speech was part of a launch event for The Great Reset, a project involving the WEF and the Prince of Wales’s Sustainable Markets Initiative, aimed at rebuilding the economic and social system…
Together, they paint a picture of an institutional set up for public-private partnerships that enshrines ‘privileges and advantages’ for the private sector and ‘duties and obligations’ for the public sector, with worrying implications for the sidelining of the public interest in a wide range of subjects: from neglecting pandemic preparedness, to fuelling deforestation and climate change.
An increasing share of total university and college enrolments have come from international sources in recent years. During the 2017/2018 academic year, 14.7% and 13.2% of all university and college enrolments were international, respectively. Given the ongoing uncertainties around the COVID-19 pandemic and the new public health restrictions imposed on international travel, physical distancing guidelines affecting classroom structures, and the real possibility that many programs may have to be delivered online, the share of enrolments in various academic programs that are international is of high relevance at the moment.
The banks are due to use about €765bn of the ultra-cheap loans to repay earlier ECB loans that are about to mature. But they are expected to use much of the remaining €543bn to buy bonds issued by their own governments — earning them an instant profit on the “carry trade” between the negative rate from the ECB and the higher yield on government bonds.
My proposal to fund the US with perpetuities comes from a paper, here. (Sorry regular readers for the repeated plug.) The rest is standard fiscal theory of the price level, spread over too many papers to give one more plug.
Crises can drive change, but sometimes it takes two crises to cement a transformation. Alone, the Great Depression ushered in the New Deal, roughly tripling U.S. federal spending as a share of output. But it took World War II to push federal spending much higher, solidifying the role of the state in the U.S. economy. If federal interventions such as the creation of the interstate highway system felt natural by the mid-1950s, it was the result of two compounding shocks, not a single one.
The central banking strategy known as "yield curve control" has helped the Bank of Japan set long-term interest rates with less need to intervene in markets, though it has yet to prove itself in boosting inflation, two top New York Federal Reserve Bank officials wrote on Monday.
The Canadian government is considering a shift to longer-term borrowing to finance its ballooning budget deficit, a strategy that has the potential to complicate matters for companies raising money in the country’s bond markets.
The merits of investing in private versus public equity have generated considerable debate, often fueled by concerns about data quality. In this paper, we use
Consumer price inflation decreased by 0.3 percentage points to 0.5 per cent in the year to May 2020, as per data released by the ONS. Our new analysis of 89,142 locally collected goods and services indicates price declines in the transport, recreation and culture, and hotels and restaurants categories. By contrast, underlying inflation, which excludes the most extreme price changes, increased in 11 UK regions, with only London recording a reduction in underlying inflation. The broad-based increase in underlying inflation led to a 0.2 percentage point increase in the national figure, to 1.2 per cent in May. This is the third month of increase in underlying inflation and for that reason our forecast suggests headline CPI inflation above 2 per cent in the 12 months to May 2021.
Rapid economic growth in the emerging worlds has placed downward pressure of manufacturing wages in the advanced world. With increasingly lower real interest rates putting upwards pressure on asset prices, these twin forces have the propensity to accelerate income inequality. What do the facts say?
Justin Trudeau’s government made every effort on Wednesday to convince Canadians the country can afford a budget deficit that will soar to 16% of economic output this year. Its actions suggest there’s some worry.
A decade ago, a buyout giant took over a group of Catholic medical centers and made some clever financial moves. The pandemic highlights the strategy’s success—and its cost.
Learn how to create professional graphics and plots in R (histogram, barplot, boxplot, scatter plot, line plot, density plot, etc.) with the ggplot2 package
Economists use different models to estimate the neutral rate. Widely cited
estimates from Federal Reserve economists Kathryn Holston, Thomas Laubach and John Williams put the real (or inflation-adjusted) neutral rate at about 0.6% in the United States as of the second quarter of 2018. This measure has declined over time. The chart below shows the Holston, Laubach, Williams (HLW) estimate of the long-run neutral rate for the US since the 1970s. Since 1972, the estimated neutral rate has declined by 2.8 percentage points.
Canada’s largest lenders are warning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government it doesn’t have carte blanche to run massive budget deficits, even though there’s some room for additional spending in the next couple of years.
Advanced economies should not worry about debt, but instead take advantage of historically low borrowing costs to increase spending on infrastructure maintenance immediately, the IMF said in a report published on Monday.
Under these agreements an organization will receive base funding but can receive more if performance targets are met or exceeded. Performance targets will vary based upon the specific needs of a region and may include any combination of measurable criteria such as employment, job retention, wage levels, or barriers faced such as: age, time spent out of the workforce, being indigenous, or being a newcomer. This approach will be used provincewide when new contracts for services are required.
Canada's 147 public universities spent $28.9 billion during the 2018/2019 academic year and had revenues of $30.7 billion. To assess the potential financial impact of the pandemic on universities, projection scenarios were developed and indicate that they could be facing losses ranging from $377 million (-0.8%) to $3.4 billion (-7.5%) in 2020/2021.
Nearly sixty percent (59%) of educators and administrators say they aren’t sure or haven’t received new cybersecurity initiatives or training for remote learning, despite 78% of educators saying they’re currently utilizing some type of online learning.
The objective of this paper is to develop a composite index to characterize the intensity of digitalization in Canadian industries. Because of the ubiquitous presence of digitalization and businesses’ and individuals’ increasing reliance on digital products and services, it is important to measure digitalization to better understand its impact on the Canadian economy. This paper first adopts multidimensional metrics to measure the extent to which firms use digital inputs to produce goods and services, using data on information and communications technology (ICT) capital, the use of intermediate ICT goods and services, the digital workforce, and robot adoption. A composite index is then constructed from these multidimensional metrics through a principal component analysis. The final index shows that digital intensity in production improved continuously from 2000 to 2015 in the Canadian economy. While almost all industries have become more digitally intensive over time, digitalization tends to be uneven across Canadian industries. The information services; telecommunications; professional, scientific and technical services; and machinery, computer, electronic product and transportation equipment manufacturing industries are among the leaders in digital intensity. Their intensities were high at the beginning of the sample period and increased significantly over time. Conversely, agriculture, mining, construction, and most manufacturing and transportation industries are among the least digitally intensive sectors, starting out low and increasing slightly over time.
The partnership includes $16.3 million, funded in part by the Government of Canada's Innovative Work-Integrated Learning program to CEWIL to fund grants that will enable the creation of curricular work-integrated learning (WIL) focusing primarily on applied research/industry projects, entrepreneurial WIL, field placements, and service-learning WIL. CEWIL is accepting proposals for 8150 WIL experiences through its new CEWIL Innovation Hub (iHUB), a centre of expertise that supports the advancement, innovation and access to WIL while ensuring projects are delivered with appropriate quality and learning standards for students.
Colleges and Institutes Canada (CICan) is the national and international voice of Canada’s publicly supported colleges, institutes of technology, cégeps, polytechnics and universities with a college mandate.
(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden has selected Celeste Drake, a longtime trade expert from AFL-CIO, to be the first director of his initiative to steer more federal dollars to U.S. manufacturers and producers, an administration official said.
Global emissions scenarios play a critical role in the assessment of strategies to mitigate climate change. The current scenarios, however, are criticized because they feature strategies with pronounced overshoot of the global temperature goal, requiring a long-term repair phase to draw temperatures down again through net-negative emissions. Some impacts might not be reversible. Hence, we explore a new set of net-zero CO2 emissions scenarios with limited overshoot. We show that upfront investments are needed in the near term for limiting temperature overshoot but that these would bring long-term economic gains. Our study further identifies alternative configurations of net-zero CO2 emissions systems and the roles of different sectors and regions for balancing sources and sinks. Even without net-negative emissions, CO2 removal is important for accelerating near-term reductions and for providing an anthropogenic sink that can offset the residual emissions in sectors that are hard to abate. Current emissions scenarios include pathways that overshoot the temperature goals set out in the Paris Agreement and rely on future net negative emissions. Limiting overshoot would require near-term investment but would result in longer-term economic benefit.
Small island developing states are currently faced with two significant challenges that are more onerous due to limited financial resources: adapting to increasing climate change risk and recovering from the pandemic. Debt-for-climate swaps provide an avenue for SIDS to address these challenges.
Policies and labour movement actors in France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Norway, Spain, Poland, Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines Decades have passed since science established that climate change is real and due to human activities. Some big fossil fuel companies received the first scientific reports about the negative effects on the climate of producing and