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THeThERALD OUTLOOK Saturday Octobers the HERALD OUTLOOK is published each by the HALTON HILLS Home Newspaper of flalton Hills Division of Canadian Newspapers Company Limited at Street Georgetown lie n 2201 PUBLISHER David A Beattie EDITOR Brian MacLeod AD MANAGER Dan Taylor Company Second lass Mail Street Registered Number CM I STUh Donna Kell Ken Colin ACCOUNTING Diane Smith CI IFI Joan ECOnOmiSt SeeS lOWer SNAFU by Bruce Beattie interest rates and rising global output Amid earthquakes and financial market upheavals a ray of hope has appeared in the October issue of The Atlantic magazine In The Coming Global Boom The Atlantic explores the arguments of economic optimists who take as their prophet Joseph Schumpeter Readers of this col umn will be familiar with this theme through one of its better known proponents Ed chief economist at Prudential Bache Securities in New York Mr Yardeni foresees rising global output and falling interest rates helped by propitious demographic patterns the aging of the post war baby boom genera tion Such a cheery view flies in the face of conventional wisdom The Atlantic notes from Ravi to Paul as well as many middle of theroad economists have been warning of impending recession or A Gary Shilling a Wall Street economist who has his own ad visory firm believes global reces sion is imminent followed by a long penod of deflation falling prices The world debt load has far outrun its collateral Mr Shilling says in The Atlantic whether you re talking about the Third World farm land corporations consumers everything It will take a major global recession to force a debt restructuring But even com ing out of the recession there will be a fierce battle for exports there a lot of extra capacity com on line the developing and a protectionist scram Governments won t help Military spending is dropping Star Wars will turn into Trade Wars It hard to foresee a happy resolution even longer term BEGINNING OR END That s a grim conclusion but there is another view The Atlantic traces the optimist school to Joseph Schumpeter an Austnan born economist who died in Mr Schumpeter identified the boom and bust of business cycles and saw economic progress inter by occasional periods of dislocation From this point of view the past 15 years of economic turmoil are about to usher in a new industrial golden age The trouble with mainstream economists Mr says is that the focus too much on formal macroeconomic models Most economists don t look much at the real economy he says It messy and doesn t translate well to models But when you stop and look the case for a long run boom is almost over whelming Berrys World They dont migrate anymore because peo ple feed them and of course the air traffic is HORRENDOUS This dummy dressed as a mail carrier just might work Researchers close to detecting in wildlife Gil Hardy Ottawa Bureau A Montreal researcher is close to establishing a biological early warning system to detect dioxins and other poisons in wildlife a test that someday may do the same for humans Philip Spear began studying the relationship between toxic poisoning and Vitamin A levels in birds eight years ago while work ing on his PhD at the University of Ottawa His work which could lead to a cheaper faster method of testing for environmental pollu tion began almost by accident Spear was working in the tional Research Councils en vironmental secretariat when he first noticed similarities in the symptoms caused by con tamination and Vitamin A ciency Actually it part of my job at all Spear said in a telephone interview from the University of Quebec at Montreal where he now teaches I got fascinated with the question because I thought we might be able to do quite a bit in explaining diox in toxicity if we understand how it affects Vitamin A Spear noticed in various reports he was reading at the that both exposure and Vitamin A deficiency produced a skin rash and other similar symptoms Spear set out to prove scientifically the relation between dioxin and Vitamin A deficiency He analyzed eggs from a contaminated colony of cor Michigan with those of a low exposure group from Manitoba s Lake Winnipegosis The preliminary results show very different amounts of Vitamin A between the two colonies It in dicates that perhaps dioxins and other related compounds are hav ing an impact on metabolism and V taminA Spearsaid CELL GROWTH The possibility that dioxin af fects Vitamin A levels has consequences for human and animal life Vitamin A or retinoid is vital to cell development and specialization If retinoid is proven susceptible to dioxins and other environmental pollutants it would explain why animals experience lower thrates and more deformities when exposed to contaminants It would mean pollution not only kills wildlife but also threatens the very survival of a species says Tom Moon chairman of the University of Ottawa biology department Spear work may show that cleaning up a polluted environ ment is too late because have already affected reproduc Moon said You are not go ing to get the species back Therefore it s important to detect pollution before entire wildlife colonies are poisoned Tests do exist which determine whether wildlife has been con taminated but they are expensive and time consuming That s because there are so many types of dioxins and other toxics that a thorough test takes time money and specialized equipment What we were looking for was a technology which was com plicated but was a broad indicator of intoxication by these kinds of compounds said Moon who supervised Spear s postdoctoral work The earlier findings have proved useful to other researchers There are other labs that are starting to measure Vitamin A levels in this regard and I think mainly because of the initial work that Phil did Moon said The research has been funded by a few small federal grants over the years ADVERTISING J nn me Valou raig Teeter Roberts PRODUCTION DFPAKTMfr NT Dave Hastings Supl AnmeOIsen Myles Susanne Wilson ManeShadbolt More auto layoffs coming Vic Parsons Bureau There was a good deal of teeth gnashing recently when General Motors announced undated plans to halt van production at its plant in Scarborough Ont a move that could bump about 2 500 Toronto- area workers from their jobs GM officials who have said they are looking for other uses for the Scar borough plant want to transfer the van line to the S No time frame was set There has already been a series of auto industry layoffs And there will be more layoffs to come analysts suggest There s no question this is a serious matter One measure of how vital the industry is to Canada is that exports of automotive pro ducts accounted for about one- quarter of the 93 billion worth of goods we sold to foreigners in the first eight months of the year Automotive products range from finished cars and trucks to sparkplugs and tires But opposition critics could be barking up the wrong tree when they bay about the layoffs being a result of the freetrade deal with the United States The fact is that industry chers have been predicting a cyclical downturn in the auto business for some time Economist Gilles of the Conference Board for in stance predicted in an interview last fall when the trade deal seemed doomed that the industry would be weaker for a couple of years because of a decline in car sales His prediction was reiterated earlier this year by auto analyst Dennis DesRosiers who foresaw a fivepercent falioff in sales this year and four per cent in 1990 before a revival in FORECASTS CONFIRMED These forecasts have been borne out by this weeks automotive trade figures from Statistics Canada StatsCan says the deoJine In Canadian exports of passenger cars in the first half of the year coincides with a 7 per cent drop in sales of North Americanmade automobiles in the U S American sales of models for which there are plants In Canada fell even more sharply registering a decline of per cent according to StatsCan Moreover there was a 10per cent decline in parts imports Since per cent of those imported parts go into production of finished vehicles in Canada that is another indication of a slowdown On the other hand Canada s truck exports in the first six mon rose by about 11 per cent There was a similar rise in export sales of parts and a rise in ex ports of tires and tubes This gave a net automotive trade surplus of billion with all coun tries In terms of trade with the S only the surplus in the first half of was billion double that of the first six months of last year Given this raw data it would be stretching a point to say that free trade is the cause of a deteriora tion in Canada industry