Population aging creates both a problem (higher taxes on a small group of workers to finance higher public pension and health care costs) and automatic adjustments that help to address that problem. The prospect of longer retirement involves an increased incentive to invest in physical capital, and labour scarcity leads to higher pre-tax wages and an increased incentive to invest in human capital. Thus, productivity growth can be favourably affected by aging. The likely empirical magnitude of this beneficial effect is assessed in this paper.

This is a study of the influence of socioeconomic factors on the state of health of older Canadians. Three years of panel data from the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics are used to model the transition probabilities between good and poor health. Care is taken to avoid the problem of endogeneity of income in modelling its effects, and to adjust reported income to free it from its strong association with age at the time of the survey. Of particular note are the significant effects found for income, in spite of universal public health care coverage. Significant effects are found also for age, education, and other variables.

This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income from 1920 to 2000 in Canada using personal income tax return data. Top income shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century, with a precipitous drop during World War II, followed by a slower decline until 1970. Since the late 1970s, top income shares have been increasing steadily and the very top shares are now as high as in the pre-war era. As in the United States, the recent increase in top income shares is the consequence of a surge in top wages and salaries. The parallel evolution of top income shares in Canada and the United States, associated with much more modest marginal tax rate cuts in Canada, suggests that the upward trend in top shares in Canada since the late 1970s cannot be explained by tax cuts. Further evidence suggests that the upward trend in Canada derives from the United States, perhaps because many Canadians have an emigration option.

The rate of growth of GDP can be expressed as the sum of the rates of growth of the population, the proportion of the population from which the labour force is drawn, the overall labour force participation rate, the employment rate, and the aggregate labour productivity ratio. Making use of this simple accounting identity we examine the contributions of the various components to the growth of GDP and GDP per capita in the half-century 1951-2001, decade by decade, and the prospective contributions to future growth under alternative demographic, participation rate, and productivity assumptions.

Although progress has been made over the last 20 years, the burden of a low income in old age is still carried by unattached women. Few researchers, however, have examined exactly where the burden of poverty falls within the category of unattached older women or the nature of this poverty. Like any other group of older Canadians, unattached women are not a homogenous population. The category of ‘unattached’ includes the separated, divorced, widowed and ever single, all of whom face different circumstances in old age because of differences over the life course. Using SLID data we examine income and sources of income from 1993 to 1999 to identify differences among these groups. The findings indicate that the separated and divorced are the poorest of all older unattached women in Canada. A key source of the difference is the growth in private pension incomes.

The recent "Romanow" and "Kirby" inquiries into the Canadian health care system recommended a publicly funded catastrophic prescription drug insurance program to protect Canadians from potentially ruinous drug costs. While the Romanow commission was not specific about the nature of such a program, the Kirby commission recommended that household prescription drug expenses be capped at 3% of total household income, or $1,500 per household member, whichever is lower, with government picking up the remainder.

Using recent survey data on household spending, we estimate how the program would assist households of different means and ages, residing in different regions of the country. We find that, despite the fact that senior and low income non-senior households are the primary beneficiaries of provincial government drug plans, average subsidies would be over 4 times higher for these households than for all other (non-senior, non-indigent) households. A small percentage of other households would be among the largest beneficiaries of the program.

Program benefits are typically larger in provinces with less generous public coverage and tend to benefit lower income households. Program costs are estimated to be at least $461 million annually, although reductions in out of pocket drug spending will reduce medical tax credits and thereby increase tax revenues by at least $80 million. Program costs appeared to be very sensitive to increased household drug spending that might result from the program introduction.

For the years 1981 to 1997 the Survey of Consumer Finances served as the main source of information about the earnings of individuals, households and families. The Survey of Labour Income Dynamics, begun in 1993, was intended to replace and to improve upon the SCF. The Labour Force Survey which began releasing earnings information in 1997 (the last year of the SCF) is a second alternative for extending historical earnings data to the present day.

This paper examines the extent to which either of these two surveys can be used to extend the SCF series to more recent times. Neither survey comes off as satisfactory in all respects as an extension of SCF earnings data though if one's purposes are more limited, such as studying the education premium, then merging results from the SCF and SLID seems a reasonable way to proceed. It is not possible here to assess the ability of SLID or LFS to extend the SCF for other applications. But this method could easily be adapted to address other similar questions.

There is a strong positive relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and health, but identifying the direction of causation is difficult. This study exploits the longitudinal nature of two Canadian surveys, the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics and the National Population Health Survey, to study the link from SES to health. For people aged 50 and older who are initially in good health we examine whether changes in health status over the next two to four years are related to prior SES, as represented by income and education. Although the two surveys were designed for quite different purposes the evidence they yield with respect to the probability of remaining in good health is strikingly similar. Both suggest that SES does play a role, that the differences across SES groups are quantitatively significant, that the differences increase with age, and that they are much same for men and women.

To provide a strong motivation for students to learn multivariate statistics and the multivariate way of thinking, this paper uses an easily understandable example of ascertaining the effect of educational attainment on migration propensity in Japan. With cross-tabulations and a logistic model, we demonstrate the necessity of the multivariate approach by showing that the control for the effect of gender is indispensable for revealing the true effect of educational attainment. We further identify two conditions under which valid inference about the effect of a factor depends critically on the control for another factor. Finally, we identify an apparent contradiction between tabulated and logistic results and present a resolution to it.