A study done in Canada by the University of BC looked at who REALLY made up this '1%' that all the Occupy protesters hate so much. Something important they conclude is that the gap between low-income and high-income demographics is massive; nothing to this degree has been seen since the Great Depression. It makes us think about how serious our economic situation really is right now. Another interesting section is around the middle of the article, where they discuss possible reasons for this severe inequality.

Recently, the NFL's Buffalo Bills made a deal with the city of Toronto to hold a certain number of regular and preseason games at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. However, due to scheduling conflicts, one of the games has had to be dropped, but the Bills say that the price of the tickets won't be going up because of it, but actually going down to increase demand. The NFL can be considered a monopoly because there is no professional football league like it in the world, and its annual revenues are huge.

This article talks about the effect production costs have had on the number of episodes in a season. In an attempt to be productively efficient as production costs per episodes rise, show producers have simply had to cut down the output of episodes. This makes sense because if we shift the AC curve left, the cost will decrease, but so will the output when AC=MC (productive efficiency).

Although there are a lot of numbers in this short article, there are a few things to consider. For one, it draws the line between revenue and profits. It would be interesting to investigate how and why revenues increased, and how this affects the profit. As well, the article talks about the companies' strategies/aims to be successful... for example, community engagement. As we've discussed, it may mean that profit/revenue/volume aren't at their maximum, but it attempts to draw in revenue through ways other than price.

Most of you all already know about RIM's decision to cut the selling price of their tablet, the Playbook, by more than half (presumably because they are discontinuing the product). This is an example of a large firm cutting costs and reducing its output (from their inventories). We can also relate it to the concept of economies of scale, since Blackberry was able to afford to lose the Playbook as their other products are more successful.

As many of us know, Canada has a great healthcare program that is provided by the government. The US, on the other hand, has opted in the past to keep healthcare a private good. The American goverment is now seeing negative repercussions of this decision, and this article outlines how they are thinking of modelling their healthcare system after Canada's by introducing government healthcare insurance. Although this may not completely eliminate private healthcare companies, it may discourage them for the reasons we learned in Week 12. This idea of reforming the current policies has stemmed from stories of families who have gone broke after needing emergency surgeries while not being able to afford insurance.

Although part of this article talks about the hypocrisy of staging Climate Change Comferences (due to the environmental implications of travelling to it), the middle of it talks about some economics. Instead of just harping on the envoronmental effects of climate change, people are suggesting that the negative externalities of creating pollution may begin to affect a country's GDP. This is interesting because now the social cost that the company should have paid is now being bounced back for everyone to pay.

This is pretty neat considering it relates to people our age living in Canada (aka me!). The Canadian government, who have set a minimum wage of $9.60/h for youths and $10.50/h for those older than 18, have decided to subsidize part or all of the payroll given out by small business to their student employees. The purpose is to try and invest in student employees so that they get the work experience they need. Although not mentioned much in the article, minimum wage plays a big roll, as now it is the government paying for the wage they set themselves... perhaps there is a chance it will be changed in the future for this reason.

Who likes cheese? In Canada we do, and it's not helpful that our dairy prices are so much higher than other countries. This article analyzes our situation compared to other countries, particularly the United States. It also brings up the idea of other countries imposing subsidies to pay out farmers to help the problem (ie. US farmers get 31 cents per litre of milk). As well, Canadian farmers get a quota to how much product they can produce, so that really restricts competition in this industry.

This article may or may not actually affect any of you, but it was interesting nonetheless. Kimberly-Clark, the company that produced Huggies diapers (among other things) is being forced to raise their prices because of higher oil costs and "tight supply driven by strong demand in China". The entire article talks about whether or not people are willing to pay more for their products, which would in turn indicate their inelasticity (as hinted at in the first paragraph).

This Financial Post article talks about the successes of Porter Airlines, a small Canadian company that founded about 5 years ago. The company is currently moving through the price mechanism, but hasn't reached its second equilibrium yet. Its demand has increased by a lot recently (due to holding a monopoly at their island airport in Toronto, and higher profit margins per plane compared to other airlines), therefore shifting the curve to the right. However, since the Price has yet to increase, they are stuck at the 'middle stage' of the price mechanism where the demand is higher, but the price is still the same. We can predict from this that the prices will soon increase to make a higher profit with the growing demand, as we've seen in the textbook graphs.

This article is about the Canadian e-book company, Kobo, and their fight for sales against Amazon's product, Kindle. Kobo and Kindle are both very similar and have been competing against one another as 'substitutes' (as we've read about) for a long time. However, a new Kindle was just released that is priced even lower than the Kobo just in time for Christmas. Kobo's problem is that since Kindle has lowered their prices, they are sliding along their demand curve and thus increasing their demand. Kobo might not be able to afford lowering their prices much further, and so this might mean their whole demand curve will shift to the left because Kindle has better prices.

This piece by The Globe and Mail outlines Canada's ongoing shortage of healthcare professionals, particularly family doctors. Although it doesn't address economics directly, this article applies to our topic because doctors are considered a 'service', and thus not having enough of them is a scarcity within Canada's economy. The author talks about how difficult it is to find a regular family doctor in her area. According to her, there are actual business dedicated to helping people locate doctors. At the end of the article, statistics reveal that this is a normal problem occuring in a large part of Canadians. There is actually also a major shortage of healthcare professionals in developing areas such as Africa, where there aren't even suitable medical locations in the case of an emergency. **By the way: I apologize for my lack of tags other than 'scarcity'... I accidentally posted the article before tagging anything else! **I fixed the tags... finally figured out how, woohoo!!