South of the border

Abstract

In his conclusion to this chapter, Paul Krugman notes that "if the US moves away from a strong welfare state, it will diverge sharply from other advanced countries - including Canada." Conversely, in attempting to integrate further with the United States, could Canada move away from being a welfare state? The intriguing conjecture in Krugman's paper is that if income distribution remains more equal in Canada than in the United States, and thus continues to more closely resemble that of the Northern European countries, Canadian voters acting rationally will show a preference for state provision of essential services, unlike voters in the United States, who, if acting rationally, might on average be averse to such provision. © McGill-Queen's University Press 2004.