These notes explore and categorize most cases of monopolistic price discrimination. A majority of these instances, when involving a homogeneous product, fall into that broad and somewhat miscellaneous class that Pigou termed second-degree discrimination. Whenever evident, profit-maximizing rules of approximations are given, the contributions of von Stackelberg (second-degree discrimination) and of Mrs. Robinson (third-degree discrimination) being later shown to be special cases of a more general analytic solution. Less authoritarian forms of discrimination arising from brand differentiation, first considered by Bailey and others, are placed in a larger context. A final section graphically distinguishes between optimal financial outcomes (for the seller) and optimal resource allocations (for the economy) under monopolistic price discrimination.

Few questions are more vexing in the development of an optimum tax structure than that of allocation of tax sources between federal and territorial governments in a federal system. The need for a substantial degree of uniformity in tax structures and burdens in the interest of optimum resource allocation, effective tax administration, and tax compliance conflicts directly with the need for fiscal autonomy on the part of the territorial governments. The result is inevitably a compromise, and in many countries, including Canada, an unstable one, with constant complaints leading to frequent review of the system. Attainment of an optimum solution is difficult at best, and in the older federations, such as Canada, the United States, and Switzerland, change is impeded by tradition, by the doctrine of states' rights, and by the reluctance of one level of government to surrender any of its control over taxation to another level. A review of the solutions to the problem adopted by three federal systems in British tropical Africa, all of relatively recent origin, is of interest both in terms of African problems and for the light which it may throw on the search for better solutions elsewhere.

During the election of April, 1963, Liberal speeches and editorials tended to depict minority government (that is, government by a cabinet with less than half the seats in the House of Commons) as a nameless, faceless horror, the political fate that is worse than death. The authors of these productions are now hard at work trying to prove themselves wrong. They may not find it easy. For they face three deeply rooted popular notions on the subject; indeed, it was precisely because these notions were so widespread and so deeply rooted that the appeal to vote for a winner proved so powerful.

The first is that minority governments are altogether exceptional, abnormal, almost unheard of, except, of course, among benighted continental Europeans and other “lesser breeds without the Law.” This is simply not so. We have had relatively few minority governments, colonial, Dominion, or provincial, in Canada; but Britain, Australia, and New Zealand have had plenty. Britain, from 1834 to 1931, had sixteen, which held office for a total of thirty-two years out of the ninety-seven. In Australia, before federation, minority governments were the rule rather than the exception in New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania till the 1890's, and in Victoria till the 1880's (New South Wales often had three or four governments in a single Parliament, South Australia four or five), and there have been plenty of minority governments in the states since federation. The Commonwealth itself had nothing but minority governments (six of them) from its inception till 1909, and another as recently as 1941–43. Minority governments were the rule also in New Zealand till the 1890's (one Parliament saw six governments). So it can scarcely be maintained, rationally, that minority government is something monstrous and unnatural, foreign to the whole spirit of British parliamentary institutions.

For many years the defence of the giant corporation and oligopoly has been rooted in the argument that both were the product of a technology that requires large-scale enterprises for efficient production. In brief, the economies of mass production are supposed to give rise to optimum-scale firms that are too large, relative to the size of markets, to permit the large numbers of sellers needed to minimize monopoly powers over prices and production.

Although still possessing many adherents, this defence of the giant corporation and oligopoly has recently fallen from favour, perhaps mainly for lack of empirical support, but probably also for other reasons that need not be examined here. In its place has come a new defence. The large oligopolistic corporations, we are now told, have become the principal sources of research and development, and thus of the technological progress which is the backbone of economic growth.