Manitoba ranks 57th out of 60 in "Economic Freedom"
7/14/2008 at 10:41 AM
A recent study from the Fraser Institude takes all 50 US States and 10 Canadian Provinces and ranks them all based on what they call "Economic Freedom." Economic freedom is basically a combination of:
(UPDATED)
- size of government (General Consumption Expenditures by Government, Transfers and Subsidies, Social security payments)
- takings and discriminatory taxation (tax revenue, marginal tax rate & threshold, indirect tax revenue, sales tax)
- labor market freedom (minimum wage law, % of government employees to other employees and union representation)
When it all shakes out, Manitoba comes in ranked 57th out of 60, ahead of only Nova Scotia, Quebec and PEI. Even though we clearly have a lot of room for improvement (statistically we're quite a bit behind even Saskatchewan) part of the problem appears to be differences between Canada and the US as 9 of the bottom 10 are all Canadian with only Alberta (#2 overall) going toe-to-toe with the US.
here's the full report (a pretty big PDF):
http://www.fraserinstitute.org/Commerce.Web/....