Barriers to Improved Capability for Low-income Canadians
Jerry Buckland,
Antonia Fikkert and
Rick Eagan
Additional contact information
Jerry Buckland: 210–520 Portage Ave. Winnipeg, Mb., R3C 0G2, Canada
Antonia Fikkert: 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, On. M3J 1P3, Canada
Rick Eagan: 588 Queen St. West, Toronto, On., M6J 1E3, Canada
Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 2010, vol. 22, issue 4, 357-389
Abstract:
This article examines barriers to improved well-being for low-income Canadians. It uses the capability approach to explore how personal, institutional and banking factors interact to create obstacles to improved capability. It does this by relying on financial life histories from 15 low-income people living in inner-cities in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg. The financial life histories are a qualitative method in which respondents were recruited using a snowball sampling method, and asked to share personal stories about their life and financial goals. Respondents are, by Canadian standards, acutely poor and several faced multiple personal barriers including mental illness and substance abuse. The results indicate that participants experienced many more periods of declining, as compared with improving, capability. Respondents identified a series of personal (e.g., illness and addiction), structural (e.g., poorly funded education and low-levels of social assistance support), and banking (e.g., high banking fees and limited appropriate services) obstacles to their improved capability. Most respondents noted that they faced several obstacles at once that created powerful unfreedoms to improved capability. Weak banking services in the neighbourhoods was an important factor in limiting the capability of the respondents.
Keywords: financial exclusion; banking; poverty; capability; inner-city (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed
Downloads: (external link)
http://jie.sagepub.com/content/22/4/357.abstract (text/html)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jinter:v:22:y:2010:i:4:p:357-389
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications (sagediscovery@sagepub.com).