Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Estimating the Economic Impact of British Columbia's Minimum Wage Increase
On March 16, 2011, British Columbia Premier Christy Clark announced her first major policy change, a $2.25 (28.1%) increase to BC?s current $8.00 per hour minimum wage. Controversy surrounds minimum wages because of the tension between well-intentioned efforts to increase incomes for lower income workers and the unfortunate reality of significant economic costs that come with increasing the minimum wage. A general misunderstanding of the types of workers who earn the minimum wage fuel that controversy. This Alert aims to provide British Columbians with an up-to-date account of these realities and an estimate of the economic costs of the recently announced increases to the province?s minimum wage.
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Niels Veldhuis
President, Fraser Institute -
Amela Karabegovic
Amela Karabegovi is a former Senior Economist of the Fraser Institute. She holds a B.M. (Great Distinction) in General Managementfrom the University of Lethbridge in Alberta and an M.A. in Economics from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. She was a coauthor of the Economic Freedom of North America , Economic Freedom of the Arab World , Myths and Realities of TILMA , Transparency of Labour Relations Boards in Canada and the United States , Measuring Labour Markets in Canada and the United States , Measuring the Flexibility of Labour Relations Laws in Canada and the United States , Tax and Expenditure Limitations: The Next Step in Fiscal Discipline , and the Prosperity Series-Ontario .… Read more