$336,000 per job created

That's what the Province of Quebec is spending, explicitly and implicitly, to entice Alcan to build a smelting plant in the Saquenay-Lac St Jean region. That is one heck of a lot of money to spend on job creation, for jobs that probably would be created elsewhere in the economy anyway, especially if the province were to cut taxes instead.



I am skeptical, to say the least, of "job creation" statistics and arguments. If the long-run Phillips Curve and the long-run aggregate supply curves are vertical, we know that job-creation programmes do nothing more than rearrange jobs rather than create them.



As Stephen Gordon says, "Electric Boondoggle du jour".