This paper develops an Index of Economic Well-being (IEWB) for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Norway and Sweden for the period 1980 to 2001 which recognizes four components: Current effective per capita consumption flows; Net societal accumulation of stocks of...

In this chapter, Lars Osberg and Andrew Sharpe provide an overview of trends in a number of dimensions of economic well-being (consumption flows, stocks of wealth, income equality, and economic security) from the lens of the Index of Economic Well-being, a new composite measure of economic...

We use the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-being (LIMEW), the most comprehensive income measure available to date, to compare economic well-being in Canada and the United States in the first decade of the 21st century. This study represents the first international comparison based on...

This report presents estimates of the Levy Institute Measure of Economic Well-Being (LIMEW) for a representative sample of Canadian households in 1999 and 2005. The results indicate that there was only modest growth in the average Canadian household’s total command over economic resources in...

In this chapter, Andrew Heisz, Andrew Jackson and Garnet Picot provide an incisive and comprehensive analysis of the distributional changes that have occurred in Canada in the 1990s as well as useful comparative perspectives both in terms of trends over time and the particular patterns that can...

The objective of this report is to document China’s productivity performance since 1978 and determine its impact on poverty. The report finds that China has made substantial progress in economic development since economic reform started in 1978. Strong economic growth has been fuelled by rapid...

The United Nations has set as a goal for the world community the halving of the rate of poverty between 1990 and 2015. Previous literature and empirical work provides a strong consensus that growth reduces poverty, and several recent studies have also found that the higher is income inequality...

In this chapter, Daniel Schwanen addresses the impact of the major trade liberalization efforts undertaken by Canada and its trading partners beginning with the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 1989. The author focuses in particular on the question of whether liberalized trade could...

The paper by Charles M. Beach and Ross Finnie represents the first attempt to quantify short-term or cyclical changes in earnings mobility in Canada. Mobility analysis can be seen as a complement to the analysis of income distribution. For a given degree of earnings inequality, more earnings...

This report provides an assessment of human capital development in British Columbia. The province's performance is above average according to the majority of the indicators we analyze, relative to both the rest of Canada and other OECD countries. However, this does not mean that there is no room...