The Dynamics of Welfare Participation in Québec

Jean-Yves Duclos, Bernard Fortin (), Guy Lacroix and Hélène Roberge

Cahiers de recherche from Université Laval - Département d'économique

Abstract: Few studies have examined the dynamics of participation in welfare in Québec and elsewhere in Canada. This paper sheds some light on that important topic, which is crucial for the understanding of the features and of the effects of welfare programmes, and for the analysis of possible reforms. For this, we use a large representative sample of welfare participants between 1979 and 1993. We find that the majority of new spells last for less than one year. Nevertheless, that a large proportion of ongoing spells are of long duration. We estimate for instance that the 50% shortest spells account for only 10% of total welfare spending. Overall, single men leave welfare more rapidly than single women, young people faster than their elders, and more educated individuals sooner than the less educated. The welfare reform of 1989 appears to have reduced significantly the rate of exit among participants under 30. Returns onto welfare generally occur shortly after exit, and at a rate which diminishes rapidly with time. Finally, we propose a measure of welfare dependence which comes up being almost twice as large for single-parent families as for all other categories.

Keywords: Social Assistance; Social Policy; Welfare Dynamics; Duration Analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pub
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ecn.ulaval.ca/w3/recherche/cahiers/1998/9817.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Dynamics of Welfare Participation in Quebec (1998)
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:lvl:laeccr:9817

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche from Université Laval - Département d'économique Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Manuel Paradis ().