Here’s another way of looking at how the provincial economy is performing…it’s a measure of government revenues coupled with overall economic growth.
Those are the metrics used by the economics unit at RBC Royal Bank to assess how the various provincial economies are performing. And they came away with this conclusion: Saskatchewan is the national leader.
In their words higher own-source revenues – money governments generate through their own taxation – are a reflection of a stronger economy. Higher incomes generally result in higher taxes and more retail transactions to attract sales tax and so on. Saskatchewan was one of a handful of provinces where deficits turned out to be smaller than expected….ours was described as significantly lower than budgeted.
Further, they looked at the revisions to GDP numbers which were generally elevated across the country because the economy is doing better than forecast when COVID arrived. What they found is that after the revisions Saskatchewan posted the strongest improvement. Our new growth number is 5.6%…up from an original forecast of 3.4…..a spread of roughly 30-percent.
