MPI researchers recently completed a comprehensive investigation of the operations of Santa’s Toy Shoppe, Inc. (STS). Located at the North Pole (postal code H-0-H-0-H-0), STS faces tremendous production challenges: their demand keeps growing each year with the world’s population, the complicated nature of some toys require long production times, they lack foreknowledge of the “must have” toy of the season (their collection of shopping mall “field agents” helps tremendously with collecting advance information on this), and they need to meet a very definite completion date.

Today, more Canadians are employed in service work than any other type of work. Current research by the Martin Prosperity Institute highlights the especially precarious nature of service work in Canada. Precarious occupations are those with limited job security, few employment benefits, a lack of control over the labour process, and very low wages. Service class work is characterized by each of these forms of precariousness.

While the public perception exists that Canada is a hot spot for music and musicians, a comparison with the global leader in music production – the United States – helps us to separate perception from reality. We find that Canada has considerably greater per capita musical activity than the United States in terms of record labels, recording studios, and licensing houses. But the United States has much higher-earning businesses that are more heavily clustered in fewer places – especially Nashville, Los Angeles, and to a lesser extent, New York.

New research from our affiliate José Lobo and his colleagues indicates that environmental protection need not come at the expense of economic growth, and vice versa. With each increase of 1% in city population, growth in carbon emissions is 0.92%. In other words, as population increases, CO₂ emissions per capita drop. The relationship with economic output is even more significant: a 1% increase corresponds with only a 0.79% increase in carbon emissions.