Viewpoint: Measuring the well-being of the poor with income or consumption: a Canadian perspective

There is a long tradition of using consumption measures derived from Statistics Canada's household expenditures surveys to study material well-being, inequality, and poverty. We offer an introduction to this research. Income and consumption measures give different pictures of the patterns of material well-being in Canada, but the differences are not as large as in the US. We also provide a comparison to Meyer and Sullivan's results on data quality. Canadian expenditure surveys are of high quality. Unique aspects of these surveys (variation in quality control measures over time and the possibility of comparing to income tax data) provide important insights into the quality of survey data on income and consumption.