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...

Lars Osberg makes the case in his paper that the major success story of Canadian social policy in the twentieth century has in fact been the reduction of poverty among senior citizens. According to Osberg, the poverty rate, defined with the poverty line measured as one-half median equivalent...

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, Joseph Heath argues that we tend to overestimate the contribution that further productivity growth will make to the welfare of Canadians. Traditionally, productivity growth was thought to contribute to increased leisure time, greater consumer satisfaction, the elimination of...

In this chapter, William Watson challenges Heath's interpretation of the benefits of productivity growth, but agrees with Richard Harris' views on the state of our knowledge about the potential contribution of social programs to productivity growth. Watson tackles Heath's assessment of the...

In this chapter, Miles Corak provides a useful overview of the state of knowledge on the issue of child poverty and most importantly reveals the complexity of the factors at play and the important gaps in our understanding of the underlying causes and effects. Corak finds that, except for those...

This paper explores the linkages between productivity and social development from the perspective of synthesizing the findings of projects undertaken by the Centre for the Study of Living Standards in three related areas. The first is a project exploring the linkages between productivity and...

This report presents the results of a number of simulations with the Social Policy Simulation Database and Model (SPSD/M) of National Child Benefit (NCB) rules, isolating the impact of these rules on low-income or poverty rates and gaps in Canada. According to the after-tax LICO, now the most...

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...