Nathaniel Li is a Senior Economist at the Fraser Institute. He holds a B.A. from the Fudan University in China and a Ph.D. in Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of Guelph. Prior to joining the Fraser Institute, he worked for the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow and the University of Guelph as a research associate. His past research work has been published in many high-quality, peer-reviewed academic journals, including the Applied Economic Perspectivesand Policy, Agricultural Economics, Preventive Medicine, and Canadian Public Policy. His current research covers a wide range of issues in fiscal, education, and labour-market policies.
Personal Income Tax Compliance for Canadians: How and at What Cost? uses a new survey and finds that roughly half of tax filers (50 per cent) prepared their 2022 income tax return themselves while more than one third (37 per cent) used a paid tax preparer—the study also suggests that one way to reduce these compliance costs is to produce prefilled income tax reports for Canadians, streamlining the process for taxpayers and saving them both time and money.
Undoing Alberta’s Personal Income Tax Hikes is a new study that finds reversing the 2015 provincial personal income tax rate increases and instituting a flat eight per cent tax rate would help restore Alberta’s tax advantage while saving taxpayers $1,573 a year, on average.
British Columbia’s Current Spending Peak: Highest in History, Highest Growth in Canada finds that the B.C. government’s per-person spending in 2022/23, the latest year of available data, was nearly 20 per cent higher than in 2019/20.
