GINI Country Report: Growing Inequalities and their Impacts in Canada

Robert Andersen and M. McIvor

GINI Country Reports from AIAS, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies

Abstract: Compared to many modern economies, the overall level of income inequality in Canada has been relatively high since 1980 and grown steadily since. Specifically, the Gini coefficient for household incomes grew from 0.37 in 1980 to 0.45 by 2009. The largest gains in incomes occurred at the very top of the income distribution. Overall, those in the middle of the income distribution were relatively unaffected. There were consequences for the poor, however. Most of the rise in inequality occurred during the 1990s, a period in Canadian history marked by government cuts to spending with the goal of tackling a huge public. Other important contributors to changes in inequality in Canada are a decline in large-scale manufacturing, which has been progressively replaced by lower paying service industry jobs, a decline in government expenditures as a proportion of GDP, and changes to the tax structure that favoured the rich. In short, Canadian governments became increasingly less concerned with social spending and redistribution from the 1990s onwards and focussed instead on decreasing Canada’s huge public debt.

Date: 2013-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www1.feb.uva.nl/aias/Canada.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www1.feb.uva.nl:443 (No such host is known. )

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:aia:ginicr:canada

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GINI Country Reports from AIAS, Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies Nieuwe Prinsengracht 130, 1018 VZ Amsterdam. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiemer Salverda ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).