IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/clh/resear/v5y2012i1.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Public Sector Wage Growth in Alberta

Author

Listed:
  • Ken Boessenkool

    (The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary)

  • Ben Eisen

    (Frontier Centre for Public Policy)

Abstract

In recent years, Alberta’s fiscal stance has shifted from large surpluses to deficits, and a large part of the blame appears to be due to rising public sector salaries. Since 2000, the province’s public sector wage bill has shot up by 119 percent — almost double the rate of growth in the rest of Canada. Wages, previously roughly at par with the rest of the country, are now higher (in many cases very substantially) across all public sector categories, including health care, social services, education and government, consuming 95 percent of the increase in provincial revenues over the past decade. At the same time, the number of public sector employees has grown faster than the overall population; it is difficult to attribute this sharp uptick to a rise in productivity, or the need to compete with private industry for skilled workers. This paper breaks down the increases in every category, arguing that if the provincial government is looking to trim expenditures, public sector salaries are a good place to start. The authors make their case using detailed Statistics Canada data, throwing down the gauntlet to defenders of the status quo and challenging them to justify these disparate increases.

Suggested Citation

  • Ken Boessenkool & Ben Eisen, 2012. "Public Sector Wage Growth in Alberta," SPP Research Papers, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, vol. 5(1), January.
    • Handle: RePEc:clh:resear:v:5:y:2012:i:1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.policyschool.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/boesenkool-public-wage-growth.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ken Boessenkool, 2010. "Does Alberta Have a Spending Problem?," SPP Communique, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, vol. 2(1), February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Janice MacKinnon & Jack M. Mintz, 2017. "Putting the Alberta Budget on a New Trajectory," SPP Research Papers, The School of Public Policy, University of Calgary, vol. 10(26), October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Colin Busby & Alex Laurin, 2013. "The 8 Percent Solution: A Sensible Tax Compromise for Albertans," e-briefs 159, C.D. Howe Institute.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:clh:resear:v:5:y:2012:i:1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Bev Dahlby (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/spcalca.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.