Keyword search

This article looks at Canadians' incomes and expeditures in the 20th century.

This article looks briefly at changes in health in the 20th century, with special focus on the concerns of Canadians in childhood, mid-life and old age.

This article traces the development of Canada from a rural to an urban society in the 20th century.

This article looks at the effect of declining religious attendance on social cohesion in the general society.

This guide presents information of interest to users of data from the Survey of Household Spending. Data are collected via personal interview conducted in January, February and March after the reference year using a paper questionnaire. Information is gathered about the spending habits, dwelling characteristics and household equipment of Canadian households during the reference year. The survey covers private households in the ten provinces and three territories. (The three territories are surveyed every second year.)

This guide includes definitions of survey terms and variables and descriptions of survey methodology and data quality. There is also a section describing the various statistics that can be created using expenditure data (e.g., budget share, market share, and aggregates).

All provinces and territories set minimum wages in their employment standards legislation. This update uses the Labour Force Survey to examine the characteristics of those who work at or below the minimum wage for experienced adults in each jurisdiction. The incidence of working for minimum wage has increased each year since 2006 but remains concentrated among youth, particularly young women.

The loss of manufacturing jobs can affect other sectors of the economy, particularly when local employment is heavily concentrated in manufacturing. This article covers income, low-income incidence and Employment Insurance use, in regions with varying concentrations of manufacturing employment. The article focuses on the period from 2000 the most recent peak in manufacturing employment to 2007 the last full year of economic growth.

Recent studies have demonstrated the quantitative importance of entry, exit, growth and decline in the industrial population. It is this turnover that rewards innovative activity and contributes to productivity growth.

While the size of the entry population is impressive - especially when cumulated over time - the importance of entry is ultimately due to its impact on innovation in the economy. Experimentation is important in a dynamic, market-based economy. A key part of the experimentation comes from entrants. New entrepreneurs constantly offer consumers new products both in terms of the basic good and the level of service that accompanies it.

This experimentation is associated with significant costs since many entrants fail. Young firms are most at risk of failure; data drawn from a longitudinal file of Canadian entrants in both the goods and service sectors show that over half the new firms that fail do so in the first two years of life. Life is short for the majority of entrants. Only 1 in 5 new firms survive to their tenth birthday.

Since so many entrants fall by the wayside, it is of inherent interest to understand the conditions that are associated with success, the conditions that allow the potential in new entrepreneurs to come to fruition. The success of an entrant is due to its choosing the correct combination of strategies and activities. To understand how these capabilities contribute to growth, it is necessary to study how the performance of entrants relates to differences in strategies and pursued activities.

This paper describes the environment and the characteristics of entrants that manage to survive and grow. In doing so, it focuses on two issues. The first is the innovativeness of entrants and the extent to which their growth depends on their innovativeness. The second is to outline how the stress on worker skills, which is partially related to training, complements innovation and contributes to growth.

Using three waves (1982, 1986, 1990) of the National Graduate Survey (NGS) we analyze the time it takes graduates of Canadian universities to start a full time job that lasts six months or more. We analyze duration to first job using the Cox proportional hazards model. Our results suggest large differences in the speed of the transition to work both within and between cohorts. They also suggest that the differences in duration to first job across NGS cohorts are not just driven by differences in business cycle conditions at the time of graduation. Over certain segments of duration the patterns of job-starting are similar across cohorts. Within cohorts the differences in the school-to-work transition across certain demographic groups are small, and for some the differences remain stable across cohorts.

This paper examines how food service providers and food stores competed for Canadians' food dollars in the 1990s, and how this intense competition affected both industries. The paper outlines some reasons for changes in both the demand for, and supply of, each industry's outputs. It also profiles in detail some characteristics of the consumer market for food services.

The publication provides principal statistics of the logging industry including number of establishments, number of employees, salaries and wages, cost of fuel and electricity, cost of materials, value of shipments and value added. It also presents commodity detail by province on inputs and outputs and estimates of total forest production, by products and by province. A data analysis, definitions and notes, a bibliography and a list of establishments by province are also included.

Montreal-Toronto was the top domestic market in 1998 for passengers on scheduled flights, followed by the Toronto-Vancouver market. Toronto-Vancouver was the top market for passengers on charter flights, followed by the Montreal-Toronto market.

Text Table 2.1 shows the change in the relationship between passenger counts and population for the ten most-frequented Canadian cities over the years 1973, 1993 and 1998.

Text Table 3.1 shows the relationship between passengers and population for each province and territory. In this table, passengers are assigned to each province/territory based on the ticket origin.

In this paper, the proportion of passengers flying within Canada that reach their destination on a direct flight is measured in order to assess the service that is offered by the carriers.

This on-line publication presents statistics and analysis on the volume of domestic air passenger traffic generated at Canadian cities and carried between pairs of Canadian points. The data may be used to indicate the relative community of interest between Canadian cities.

Revenues of private television broadcasters reached $1,862.9 in 1999, an increase of 2.2% from 1998. This increase is modest when compared to the two previous years where revenues grew 7.0% and 6.3% respectively. There was very little change in the relative importance of sources of revenues; the sale of air time accounted for 94.1% of revenues compared to 94.6% a year earlier.

To provide data users with a more complete picture of the activies associated with the Couriers and Local Messengers industry.

Revenues of private radio broadcasters reached $971.9 million in 1999, an increase of 3.2% from 1998. This increase is modest when compared to the two previous years where revenues rose 8.1% and 7.5% respectively.

Data on furniture and fixture industries clearly show the tremendous expansion period affecting these industries. Several establishments have taken advantage of the favourable economic conditions and the openness of North American markets to increase their deliveries to the United States. Foreign markets have been the driving force behind the furniture and fixture industries' growth in the past decade, since large establishments generally have more resources to break into these markets.

The primary purpose of this article is to present a new time series data and to demonstrate its analytical potential and not to provide a detailed analysis of these data. The analysis in section 5.2.4 will deal primarily with the trends of major variables dealing with domestic and transborder traffic.

This article focusses on children who receive special education because of a physical, emotional, behavioural or other problem. It uses the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores children's academic achievement, behaviour, classroom environment and other school-related experiences, using the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores the role of parents in the learning environment of children aged 6 to 11 years, using results from the first cycle of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY).

This article explores the effects of early childhood education and care programs on school performance and experiences.

This paper examines how several factors contribute to innovative activity in the Canadian manufacturing sector. First, it investigates the extent to which intellectual property right protection stimulates innovation. Second, it examines the contribution that R&D makes to innovation. Third, it considers the importance of various competencies in the area of marketing, human resource, technology and production to the innovation process. Fourth, it examines the extent to which a larger firm size and less competition serve to stimulate competition-the so-called Schumpeterian hypothesis. Fifth, the effect of the nationality of a firm on innovation is also investigated. Finally, the paper examines the effect of an industry's environment on a firm's ability to innovate.

Several findings are of note. First, the relationship between innovation and patent use is found to be much stronger going from innovation to patent use than from patent use to innovation. Firms that innovate take out patents; but firms and industries that make more intensive use of patents do not tend to produce more innovations. Second, while R&D is important, developing capabilities in other areas, such as technological competency and marketing, is also important. Third, size effects are significant. The largest firms tend to be more innovative. As for competition, intermediate levels of competition are the most conducive to innovation. Fourth, foreign-controlled firms are not significantly more likely to innovate than domestic-controlled firms once differences in competencies have been taken into account. Fifth, the scientific infrastructure provided by university research is a significant determinant of innovation.

This paper revisits trends in the level and distribution of income among Canadian seniors in the context of what is arguably the major source of change in these trends since the end of the seventies, the maturation of Canada's public and private earnings-related pension systems. The expanded role of earnings-related pensions in the 1980s and 1990s is largely the result of changes that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. The Canada and Quebec Pension Plans (C/QPP) were implemented in 1966 and the first cohort to receive full C/QPP benefits turned 65 in 1976. Cohorts retiring after this period were also the beneficiaries of the expansion of private occupational pensions that took place between the 1950s and the 1970s. The author relies on a detailed decomposition of income by source to show that not only did the maturation of these earnings-related programs produce a substantial increase in average real incomes but also to a substantial reduction in income inequality among the elderly, due mainly to C/QPP benefits. Rising real incomes went disproportionately to lower income seniors contributing to the well-known decline in low-income rates among the elderly.

The current economic context obliges all partners of health-care systems, whether public or private, to identify those factors that determine the use of health-care services. To increase our understanding of the phenomena that underlie these relationships, Statistics Canada and the Manitoba Centre for Health Policy and Evaluation have established a new database. For a representative sample of the province of Manitoba, cross-sectional micro-data on the level of health of individuals and on their socioeconomic characteristics, and detailed longitudinal data on the use of health-care services have been linked. In this presentation, we will discuss the general context of the linkage of records from various organizations, the protection of privacy and confidentiality. We will also present results of studies which should not have been performed in the absence of the linked database.

A meta analysis was performed to estimate the proportion of liver carcinogens, the proportion of chemicals carcinogenic at any site, and the corresponding proportion of anticarcinogens among chemicals tested in 397 long-term cancer bioassays conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program. Although the estimator used was negatively biased, the study provided persuasive evidence for a larger proportion of liver carcinogens (0.43,90%CI: 0.35,0.51) than was identified by the NTP (0.28). A larger proportion of chemicals carcinogenic at any site was also estimated (0.59,90%CI: 0.49,0.69) than was identified by the NTP (0.51), although this excess was not statistically significant. A larger proportion of anticarcinogens (0.66) was estimated than carcinogens (0.59). Despite the negative bias, it was estimated that 85% of the chemicals were either carcinogenic or anticarcinogenic at some site in some sex-species group. This suggests that most chemicals tested at high enough doses will cause some sort of perturbation in tumor rates.

In this Issue is a column where the Editor biefly presents each paper of the current issue of Survey Methodology. As well, it sometimes contain informations on structure or management changes in the journal.

Much work on probabilistic methods of linkage can be found in the statistical literature. However, although many groups undoubtedly still use deterministic procedures, not much literature is available on these strategies. Furthermore there appears to exist no documentation on the comparison of results for the two strategies. Such a comparison is pertinent in the situation where we have only non-unique identifiers like names, sex, race etc. as common identifiers on which the databases are to be linked. In this work we compare a stepwise deterministic linkage strategy with the probabilistic strategy, as implemented in AUTOMATCH, for such a situation. The comparison was carried out on a linkage between medical records from the Regional Perinatal Intensive Care Centers database and education records from the Florida Department of Education. Social security numbers, available in both databases, were used to decide the true status of the record pair after matching. Match rates and error rates for the two strategies are compared and a discussion of their similarities and differences, strengths and weaknesses is presented.

The fusion sample obtained by a statistical matching process can be considered a sample out of an artificial population. The distribution of this artificial population is derived. If the correlation between specific variables is the only focus the strong demand for conditional independence can be weakened. In a simulation study the effects of violations of some assumptions leading to the distribution of the artificial population are examined. Finally some ideas concerning the establishing of the claimed conditional independence by latent class analysis are presented.

Following the problems with estimating underenumeration in the 1991 Census of England and Wales the aim for the 2001 Census is to create a database that is fully adjusted to net underenumeration. To achieve this, the paper investigates weighted donor imputation methodology that utilises information from both the census and census coverage survey (CCS). The US Census Bureau has considered a similar approach for their 2000 Census (see Isaki et al 1998). The proposed procedure distinguishes between individuals who are not counted by the census because their household is missed and those who are missed in counted households. Census data is linked to data from the CCS. Multinomial logistic regression is used to estimate the probabilities that households are missed by the census and the probabilities that individuals are missed in counted households. Household and individual coverage weights are constructed from the estimated probabilities and these feed into the donor imputation procedure.

To reach their target audience efficiently, advertisers and media planners need information on which media their customers use. For instance, they may need to know what percentage of Diet Coke drinkers watch Baywatch, or how many AT&T customers have seen an advertisement for Sprint during the last week. All the relevant data could theoretically be collected from each respondent. However, obtaining full detailed and accurate information would be very expensive. It would also impose a heavy respondent burden under current data collection technology. This information is currently collected through separate surveys in New Zealand and in many other countries. Exposure to the major media is measured continuously, and product usage studies are common. Statistical matching techniques provide a way of combining these separate information sources. The New Zealand television ratings database was combined with a syndicated survey of print readership and product usage, using statistical matching. The resulting Panorama service meets the targeting information needs of advertisers and media planners. It has since been duplicated in Australia. This paper discusses the development of the statistical matching framework for combining these databases, and the heuristics and techniques used. These included an experiment conducted using a screening design to identify important matching variables. Studies evaluating and validating the combined results are also summarized. The following three major evaluation criteria were used; accuracy of combined results, statibility of combined results and the preservation of currency results from the component databases. The paper then discusses how the prerequisites for combining the databases were met. The biggest hurdle at this stage was the differences between the analysis techniques used on the two component databases. Finally, suggestions for developing similar statistical matching systems elsewhere will be given.

Data fusion as discussed here means to create a set of data on not jointly observed variables from two different sources. Suppose for instance that observations are available for (X,Z) on a set of individuals and for (Y,Z) on a different set of individuals. Each of X, Y and Z may be a vector variable. The main purpose is to gain insight into the joint distribution of (X,Y) using Z as a so-called matching variable. At first however, it is attempted to recover as much information as possible on the joint distribution of (X,Y,Z) from the distinct sets of data. Such fusions can only be done at the cost of implementing some distributional properties for the fused data. These are conditional independencies given the matching variables. Fused data are typically discussed from the point of view of how appropriate this underlying assumption is. Here we give a different perspective. We formulate the problem as follows: how can distributions be estimated in situations when only observations from certain marginal distributions are available. It can be solved by applying the maximum entropy criterium. We show in particular that data created by fusing different sources can be interpreted as a special case of this situation. Thus, we derive the needed assumption of conditional independence as a consequence of the type of data available.

The effect of the environment on health is of increasing concern, in particular the effects of the release of industrial pollutants into the air, the ground and into water. An assessment of the risks to public health of any particular pollution source is often made using the routine health, demographic and environmental data collected by government agencies. These datasets have important differences in sampling geography and in sampling epochs which affect the epidemiological analyses which draw them together. In the UK, health events are recorded for individuals, giving cause codes, a data of diagnosis or death, and using the unit postcode as a geographical reference. In contrast, small area demographic data are recorded only at the decennial census, and released as area level data in areas distinct from postcode geography. Environmental exposure data may be available at yet another resolution, depending on the type of exposure and the source of the measurements.

As the population ages, a greater demand for long-term care services and, in particular, nursing homes is expected. Policy analysts continue to search for alternative, less costly forms of care for the elderly and have attempted to develop programs to delay or prevent nursing-home entry. Health care administrators required information for planning the future demand for nursing-home services. This study assesses the relative importance of predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics in predicting and understanding nursing-home entry.

A population needs-based health care resource allocation model was developed and applied using age, sex and health status of populations to measure population need for health care in Ontario. To develop the model, provincial data on self-assessed health and health service utilization by age and sex from 62,413 respondents to the 1990 Ontario Health Survey (OHS) were used in combination with provincial health care expenditure data for the fiscal year 1995/96 by age and sex. The model was limited to the services that were covered in the OHS (general practitioner, specialist physician, optometry, physiotherapy, chiropractic and acute hospital). The distribution of utilization and expenditures between age-sex-health status categories was used to establish appropriate health care resource shares for each age-sex-health status combination. These resource shares were then applied to geographic populations using age, sex and health status data from the OHS together with more recent population estimates to determine the needs-based health care resource allocation for each area. Total dollar allocations were restricted to sum to the 1995/96 provincial budget and were compared with 1995/96 allocations to determine the extent to which Ontario allocations are consistent with the relative needs of the area populations.

To augment the amount of available information, data from different sources are increasingly being combined. These databases are often combined using record linkage methods. When there is no unique identifier, a probabilistic linkage is used. In that case, a record on a first file is associated with a probability that is linked to a record on a second file, and then a decision is taken on whether a possible link is a true link or not. This usually requires a non-negligible amount of manual resolution. It might then be legitimate to evaluate if manual resolution can be reduced or even eliminated. This issue is addressed in this paper where one tries to produce an estimate of a total (or a mean) of one population, when using a sample selected from another population linked somehow to the first population. In other words, having two populations linked through probabilistic record linkage, we try to avoid any decision concerning the validity of links and still be able to produce an unbiased estimate for a total of the one of two populations. To achieve this goal, we suggest the use of the Generalised Weight Share Method (GWSM) described by Lavallée (1995).

The application of dual system estimation (DSE) to matched Census / Post Enumeration Survey (PES) data in order to measure net undercount is well understood (Hogan, 1993). However, this approach has so far not been used to measure net undercount in the UK. The 2001 PES in the UK will use this methodology. This paper presents the general approach to design and estimation for this PES (the 2001 Census Coverage Survey). The estimation combines DSE with standard ratio and regression estimation. A simulation study using census data from the 1991 Census of England and Wales demonstrates that the ratio model is in general more robust than the regression model.