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I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one. Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographica
by Tiktaalik 4y ago
I think your point about USA benefiting from a single big market is a strong one.
Consider for contrast Canada, also a single language market, also geographically isolated, and sharing many of the inherent benefits of NA that America has. Canada though, not often considered a real economic dynamo in the same way as the USA.
Well one big difference is that Canada is a relatively small population spread thin over an enormously large area.
In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace.
It would be remarkably simpler for a Vancouver company to expand into Seattle and Portland for example, but keeping within the Canadian borders the next natural expansion point is all the way over in Calgary, dramatically far away and a (surprisingly) remarkably different politicial and cultural environment.
Some of these problems for Canada mitigated after NAFTA in the 1980s, but still one can see here how the USA is in a better position with its huge and spread out population.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- foobiekr 4y agoA big issue for Canada is that the government focused on resource extraction.
- randomdata 4y agoThe bigger issue is that isn’t just one government. And those governments largely do not allow free trade, especially historically. Only recently was a limited free trade agreement finally signed between provinces. In the US, the federal government supersedes the individual states. It can come down heavy handed and say that trade between states is there to go nuts with. In Canada, the federal government is only an equal to the provinces and must stay in its lane. Matters like interprovincial trade is beyond its jurisdiction.
- nafey 4y agoI heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable.
- HWR_14 4y agoIt's not really that remarkable. 98.6% of Canadas population lives in provinces that border the US. And provinces don't have much population. Outside Ontario, no province has more people than NYC. I would imagine more trade would happen with a land-bordering country with 90x the population than with a neighboring province. Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state.
- TMWNN 4y ago> Or, to put it another way, I would not be shocked if every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state. No. No US state has trade with Canada at more than 15% of state GDP <https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trade_importsexports_as_a_percentage_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_tra...>, and Canada is a bigger trade partner for the US than China.
- HWR_14 4y ago"No US state has trade with Canada as more than 15%" doesn't disprove that "every US state trades more with China than it does with any other state". GDP and interstate or international trade are pretty different concepts. And while Canada is a bigger trade partner in total than China, I'm willing to bet that China is more evenly distributed between the states as a trade partner.
- TMWNN 4y ago>I heard (not verified) that every province of Canada trades more with USA than with any other province which I think is quite remarkable. As of 2017, international trade was 65% of Canadian GDP, compared to 40% of GDP for interprovincial trade. <https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA2019158.ashx https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/WP/2019/WPIEA...> Another way to think about this: <https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trade_importsexports_as_a_percentage_of/ https://np.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/6vism4/canadaus_trad...>
- CountSessine 4y agoIt's even worse than that because we didn't have a commerce-clause the way you do. Canada actually has trade tariffs between it's own provinces. It was only in 2017 that the provinces signed a free trade agreement with each other, and even then it was a very limited agreement with enforcement issues.
- adriand 4y agoI’m Canadian and I think this is insane. Free trade between the provinces seems like a no-brainer. I also think we should be taking a harder look at our protectionism against American companies. I understand the value of having healthy domestic industries but the prices of cellphone plans here, for example, are nothing short of outrageous. We already pay so much more than Americans in taxes, must the services we buy from private companies also be so much more expensive than stateside?
- dopidopHN 4y agoJust to give you additional data point with cell phone prices. I’m French but I’m living in the Us since a decade or so. Cell phone prices are considerably cheaper in France ( €30 gets you unlimited everything on mobile and €80 is a combo for fiber + mobile plan ) But yet, that a heavily regulated market. If I’m correct there is 5 licences. All other companies have to buy and resell bandwidth thought those 5 licence. They tend to be French company. Here I pay close to $200 total for the same service ( actually lesser service, I can’t have fiber where I live ) Maybe those expensive price are not due to that regulation? ( or maybe it is. I don’t know, but I wanted to give you a counter example )
- pbourke 4y agoCanada isn’t a single language market.
- dopidopHN 4y agoIt’s more than say, Spain+Germany+France+Italy+Uk
- roflyear 4y agoWell I guess the US has this problem too. I lived in a town where a significant portion of the population didn't speak English fluently
- irrational 4y agoI think the downvotes are thinking you are joking about peoples’ english proficiency, while I assume you just mean there is a large Hispanic population in your town.
- roflyear 4y agoAh. Yes correct. The majority of people in my town spoke spanish, and a significant percent did not speak english at all.
- dopidopHN 4y agoWell, even if you put language aside. Each European countries is still wildly différents. Less and less, that’s true. But regulation, borders, culture, habits, buying power, taste… The first startup I worked for was wildly successful in France. We had dream of conquest of all Europe, of course. Each new country was a headache, nothing to do with langage. ( language was the easy part ) People wanted different stuff. We were able to make it to Italy and the UK, got laughed out of the room in Germany. Never got more than mild traction in Spain and nobody talked to us in Portugal. Randomly we got Chinese customers. Super hyped. Then we realized that while doing all that … we had let our primary market down and that someone else was eating our lunch there. Got bankrupt a year after. It was poor execution. But I still think that expending from Nebraska to Missouri is easier :)
- agent281 4y agoCouple points: - Canada is an English and French speaking country. - Most of Canada's population lives next to the Great Lakes region so it is somewhat dense there, but most of the country is empty https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/population_distribution_in_canada_oc/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/8pmzd7/pop...
- TMWNN 4y ago>In Canada there's a natural and easy North/South transportation and trade links, but East/West nature of the country breaks that. As Paul Krugman wrote, Canada is closer to the US than to itself. <https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/ https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/eh/> >I read somewhere that prior to Canadian Confederation the Maritime provinces did thriving business with the North East United States trading easily using sea links, but after confederation tariffs ruined this trade, and trade with Quebec and Ontario was more expensive and not as viable. The Maritimes never really recovered their pace. Correct. Confederation was the biggest mistake in the Maritimes' history. From an economic or demographic perspective, the region since 1867 has been in constant decline. The single most-important reason is the region's loss of its traditional US markets; unsurprisingly, the rest of Canada has *never* compensated for this loss in terms of economic activity. Before 1867 the Maritimes' economic ties were to New England and the rest of the US, not to Ontario and Quebec. Had Nova Scotians' wishes been followed by London in 1867 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Confederation_Party>, it would not have stayed with the other provinces in confederation. No railroad existed between the Maritimes and Ontario/Quebec until the 1870s <https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolonial-railway/ https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/intercolon...>! Well into the early 20th century, an ambitious young man or woman from the Maritimes went to Boston or New York in what locals called the "Boston States", not to Montreal or Quebec. Such an outcome was exactly what Nova Scotia's fierce opponents of Confederation (and, usually, advocates of US annexation) feared <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada#Nova_Scotia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_movements_of_Canada...>. There is no inherent reason why the region can't be as wealthy/populated as New England today. Northern Maine is empty because of a conscious decision to keep it for forestry; despite its northern two thirds being devoid of human life, Maine alone has two thirds of the population of the Maritimes. A PEI with full, untariffed access to its traditional US customers might have received more Italian, Irish, and Portuguese immigrants drawn to its fishing and potato industries. To put another way, an American PEI today could have 500,000 people with 100,000 people each from greater New York and Los Angeles, and 50,000 each from Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta; i.e. unnoticeable decreases in those areas. As for Newfoundland, that things have improved since 1949, and especially the recent oil boom, does not change the immense poverty for most of the island's history. Read the accounts of the British/Canadian/American officials and soldiers who came to the Rock during WW2; the "Newfie" pejorative arose among the Canadians because even they—much poorer than their American counterparts than now, relatively speaking—could not believe just how backwards things were.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]