News
More aid = More trade
D
evelopment assistance may boost Canadian exports to aid recipient countries, a study by the Canadian International Development Platform suggests. The study, described as a first attempt to “measure the elasticity of Canadian exports to aid,” studied countries that received Canadian official development assistance between 1989 and 2015. The average return over that period on a dollar of gross official development assistance was between $1.10 and $1.19 in exports, the report says. “In addition to the core moral and humanitarian purpose of aid, an added benefit over time may be that the same investment has the effect of boosting Canadian exports to aid recipient countries.” While the researchers state that the main purpose of foreign aid should continue to be poverty reduction, this aid leads to “an effect that is
additional and complementary to the core moral and humanitarian imperative that is and should continue to be the main driver behind Canada’s foreign aid.” About 98.5 per cent of Canadian aid is not tied. Aid is considered “tied” when a condition for its disbursement to a partner country is that the proceeds can only be used to buy goods and services from the donor country providing the assistance. The study authors argue that Canada has opportunities to improve the linkage between trade and development strategies. This is true both in areas where Canada currently is strong, such as agriculture and agrifood, as well as “high tech, high-value-added and ‘sunrise’ sectors” such as clean technologies. ◆
Cash, or skin chip?
Microchips have become a common way for vets to help animal shelters identify Fido or Fluffie’s owners
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should the furry friends go missing. How about a microchip for employees so they don’t need to bring cash for the vending machine, carry a pass to enter a building or remember log in codes for computers? Three Square Market, a Wisconsin technology company, put microchips under the skin of 40 workers who volunteered to have the procedure, USA Today reports. The chips do not have GPS-like abilities to track employees, but is an effort to increase convenience and move to cashless payments, the company says. Religion professors interviewed by the newspaper said getting a microchip in the arm does not fulfil the Book of Revelations’ warnings about “the mark of the beast” prophecy. But concerns over that very question led to a $500,000 court award to a West Virginia coal miner who quit his job when his employer wouldn’t honor his religious objection to using the firm’s biometric hand scanner. That device tracked hours worked by linking a number to an image of a worker’s hand. ◆
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The Marketplace January February 2018
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