Brought from the halifax thread:
Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
What does "foundation of the regional boom" even mean?
There is a lot of irrational exuberance in St. John's lately. It has had some good years, but that doesn't mean that other places have been doing badly. I think Newfoundland and New Brunswick still have about the same GDP. Newfoundland is nowhere near the GDP of all the Maritime provinces combined. Many of the predictions for GDP growth in 2012 actually have Newfoundland below Nova Scotia because of declining production in one of the offshore projects. More generally, a lot of excitement seems to come from GDP figures, but GDP isn't necessarily a great indicator of money in the local economy, particularly when you are talking about a small province dominated by some major energy companies that are likely taking profits somewhere else.
At the end of the day with a retailer like IKEA they look at the number of people who can reasonably be expected to visit a store and how much money those shoppers have to spend. As we can see from the statistics, there are about twice as many shoppers in the Halifax area and the incomes around the same so we can expect there to be about twice as much money. The true gap is larger than that because within about an hour of a store in Halifax there would be more population than there is in all of Newfoundland and Labrador. This is why the Halifax area has a wider diversity of retailers than anywhere else in the region.
|
It cannot all be going away, we are the only "have province" in well eastern Canada
Which means we do not have the need for equalization payments and do not receive them
just as some background reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equaliz...ents_in_Canada