Cash Transfers Matter! A Critique of the Senate Report on Postsecondary Education
Abstract
The Standing Senate Committee on National Finance has recently recommended a major change in the way that the federal government provides support to the provinces for postsecondary education. It recommends that the cash transfers under EPF be eliminated and replaced with additional transfers of tax points to the provinces designed to provide the same amount of money. The Committee believes that the current arrangements do not influence the spending priorities of the provinces and such a change would not alter this fact. This paper argues that the Senate Report is based on an economic approach to grants that has been under serious question for 15 years. Both the traditional and the modern theory of grants are discussed. It is argued that there are reasons to believe that a change to the new arrangements would influence provincial spending priorities. Empirical estimates of the change show that provincial governments could be expected to decrease their support for postsecondary education by between $38 to $48 million per year over the next 5 years as a direct result of the proposed change in the way the transfers are made.
Metrics
Published
1987-12-31
Issue
Section
Articles
DOI
License
Copyright in the article is vested with the Author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
