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This guide presents an overview of the scope and structure of the Pension Satellite Account as well as the methodology used to derive its stocks and flows estimates.

New data from the Pension Satellite Account show there have been several notable shifts so far this decade in the structure of pension assets. Assets have nearly quadrupled, mostly due to higher investment income. Contributions rose steadily, but barely kept up with the increase in withdrawals as the population aged rapidly.

This book is designed to contribute to the foundation of basic information that leaders and researchers will need when they begin to devote much more time and resources to the institutional adjustments that the up-coming wave of retirements among baby boomers will require. Its contents deal with aspects of retirement that have been outside the main focus in the research literature, but which will likely receive much greater attention in the future. These aspects include social issues arising from the emergence of a large number of people who form a substantial proportion of the adult population and whose length of time in retirement will be as long as that of a generation, roughly 25 years; women's retirement; family dynamics and retirement; and retirement processes among people with no career job as conventionally defined. A large part of the book is devoted to scientific papers that are based upon Statistics Canada's data and which require substantial innovations of useful concepts and data series that serve to illustrate the potentials of our data.

There has been growing interest in the state of the pension system in Canada, particularly as the baby-boom generation enters retirement age. Pension assets comprise a large portion of personal net worth. In response to the demand for more detailed information on this issue, Statistics Canada has developed a Pension Satellite Account (PSA). The Pension Satellite Account covers the entire universe of the retirement regime in Canada which includes government-sponsored social security, employer-sponsored pension plans and voluntary individual retirement savings plans. In this preliminary release, a time series of pension assets by type from 1990 to 2007 is published as a supplement to the National Balance Sheet.

The subject of this paper is the use of administrative data like tax data and social security data for structural business statistics. In this paper also the newly developed statistics on general practitioners is discussed.

This paper compares the economic well-being of recent widows in four OECD countries (Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Germany) during the 1990s.

In this paper, we revisit trends in low-income among Canadian children by taking advantage of recent developments in the measurement of low-income intensity. We focus in particular on the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon (SST) index and its elaboration by Osberg and Xu. Low-income intensity declined in the 1980s but rose in the 1990s. Declining earnings put upward pressure on low-income levels over much of the period. Higher transfers more than offset this pressure in the 1980s and continued to absorb a substantial share of the increase through 1993. In contrast, the rise in low-income intensity after 1993 reflected reductions in UI and social assistance benefits that were not offset by increased employment earnings, at least to 1996 the latest year used in this paper.

A major aim of the paper is methodological. We contrast results using the SST index with results produced by the more familiar low-income rate, the usual measure for indexing low-income trends. The low-income rate is embedded in the SST index, but unlike the index, the rate incorporates only partial information on the distribution of low-income. Consequently, the low-income rate is generally unable to detect the changes we describe and this is true irrespective of the choice of low-income cut-off. Compared to the low-income intensity measure, the rate is also relatively insensitive to changes in transfer payments and employment earnings.

The second edition of Historical statistics of Canada was jointly produced by the Social Science Federation of Canada and Statistics Canada in 1983. This volume contains about 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s. The tables are arranged in sections with an introduction explaining the content of each section, the principal sources of data for each table, and general explanatory notes regarding the statistics. In most cases, there is sufficient description of the individual series to enable the reader to use them without consulting the numerous basic sources referenced in the publication.

The electronic version of this historical publication is accessible on the Internet site of Statistics Canada as a free downloadable document: text as HTML pages and all tables as individual spreadsheets in a comma delimited format (CSV) (which allows online viewing or downloading).

The distribution of income changes over time, as does the proportion of total income received by different family types. This aritcle examines the relative shares of total family income for different family groups between 1970 and 1995, along with changes in the composition of these groups. It complements the family income study published in the Winter 1998 issue of perspectives.

This paper investigates the inter-provincial labour mobility behaviour of immigrants relative to that of native-born Canadians. Foreign-born Canadians differ a great deal from their domestically-born counterparts. The foreign-born population is geographically concentrated in a few provinces and a few big cities. As a whole, they are older, better educated, more likely to be married, and more likely to have dependent children and bigger households. They are less active in participating in full-time education and training. They fare relatively better in the labour market. As a result, a higher proportion of them receive social security benefits that are directly tied to the presence of dependent children or age such as family allowance benefits and pension income, but a lower proportion receive benefits that are related to labour market performance such as employment insurance benefits and social assistance benefits.

As a whole, immigrants are relatively less mobile inter-provincially. This is true both nationally and across almost every province. Among those who move to other provinces, destinations for foreign-born migrants are highly geographically concentrated. Most of them make their new homes in Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia. A significantly lower proportion of them relocate to other provinces for economic considerations but a much higher proportion move to go to school or after retirement. Earnings return to their inter-provincial migration is significantly more substantial. This is the result of both wage increase and more hours of work after migration.

Multi-variate regression results show that there are no statistically significant structural differences in the determinants of inter-provincial migration decisions between comparable foreign- and native-born Canadians. The probability of moving to other provinces, for immigrants as well as for domestically-born Canadians, is higher if earnings potentials elsewhere are relatively higher, lower if it is relatively harder to find employment elsewhere, higher among better educated workers, lower among French-speaking Canadians, lower among union members, and decreases with age, family size and job tenure. None of the proxies for government's labour market interventions significantly affect the decision to move inter-provincially. The lower mobility rates among the foreign-born are fully attributable to distributional and compositional differences between the immigrant and non-immigrant populations.

These findings have a direct policy implication on immigration selection. To encourage population and labour force growth in economically less prosperous provinces, it appears appropriate and effective to amend the current immigration selection and approval system, considering intended destinations as an additional factor and awarding additional points to applicants who choose designated provinces.

The second edition of Historical statistics of Canada was jointly produced by the Social Science Federation of Canada and Statistics Canada in 1983. This volume contains about 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s. The tables are arranged in sections with an introduction explaining the content of each section, the principal sources of data for each table, and general explanatory notes regarding the statistics. In most cases, there is sufficient description of the individual series to enable the reader to use them without consulting the numerous basic sources referenced in the publication.

The electronic version of this historical publication is accessible on the Internet site of Statistics Canada as a free downloadable document: text as HTML pages and all tables as individual spreadsheets in a comma delimited format (CSV) (which allows online viewing or downloading).

New data from the Pension Satellite Account show there have been several notable shifts so far this decade in the structure of pension assets. Assets have nearly quadrupled, mostly due to higher investment income. Contributions rose steadily, but barely kept up with the increase in withdrawals as the population aged rapidly.

This book is designed to contribute to the foundation of basic information that leaders and researchers will need when they begin to devote much more time and resources to the institutional adjustments that the up-coming wave of retirements among baby boomers will require. Its contents deal with aspects of retirement that have been outside the main focus in the research literature, but which will likely receive much greater attention in the future. These aspects include social issues arising from the emergence of a large number of people who form a substantial proportion of the adult population and whose length of time in retirement will be as long as that of a generation, roughly 25 years; women's retirement; family dynamics and retirement; and retirement processes among people with no career job as conventionally defined. A large part of the book is devoted to scientific papers that are based upon Statistics Canada's data and which require substantial innovations of useful concepts and data series that serve to illustrate the potentials of our data.

There has been growing interest in the state of the pension system in Canada, particularly as the baby-boom generation enters retirement age. Pension assets comprise a large portion of personal net worth. In response to the demand for more detailed information on this issue, Statistics Canada has developed a Pension Satellite Account (PSA). The Pension Satellite Account covers the entire universe of the retirement regime in Canada which includes government-sponsored social security, employer-sponsored pension plans and voluntary individual retirement savings plans. In this preliminary release, a time series of pension assets by type from 1990 to 2007 is published as a supplement to the National Balance Sheet.

The subject of this paper is the use of administrative data like tax data and social security data for structural business statistics. In this paper also the newly developed statistics on general practitioners is discussed.

This paper compares the economic well-being of recent widows in four OECD countries (Canada, the United States, Great Britain and Germany) during the 1990s.

In this paper, we revisit trends in low-income among Canadian children by taking advantage of recent developments in the measurement of low-income intensity. We focus in particular on the Sen-Shorrocks-Thon (SST) index and its elaboration by Osberg and Xu. Low-income intensity declined in the 1980s but rose in the 1990s. Declining earnings put upward pressure on low-income levels over much of the period. Higher transfers more than offset this pressure in the 1980s and continued to absorb a substantial share of the increase through 1993. In contrast, the rise in low-income intensity after 1993 reflected reductions in UI and social assistance benefits that were not offset by increased employment earnings, at least to 1996 the latest year used in this paper.

A major aim of the paper is methodological. We contrast results using the SST index with results produced by the more familiar low-income rate, the usual measure for indexing low-income trends. The low-income rate is embedded in the SST index, but unlike the index, the rate incorporates only partial information on the distribution of low-income. Consequently, the low-income rate is generally unable to detect the changes we describe and this is true irrespective of the choice of low-income cut-off. Compared to the low-income intensity measure, the rate is also relatively insensitive to changes in transfer payments and employment earnings.

The second edition of Historical statistics of Canada was jointly produced by the Social Science Federation of Canada and Statistics Canada in 1983. This volume contains about 1,088 statistical tables on the social, economic and institutional conditions of Canada from the start of Confederation in 1867 to the mid-1970s. The tables are arranged in sections with an introduction explaining the content of each section, the principal sources of data for each table, and general explanatory notes regarding the statistics. In most cases, there is sufficient description of the individual series to enable the reader to use them without consulting the numerous basic sources referenced in the publication.

The electronic version of this historical publication is accessible on the Internet site of Statistics Canada as a free downloadable document: text as HTML pages and all tables as individual spreadsheets in a comma delimited format (CSV) (which allows online viewing or downloading).

The distribution of income changes over time, as does the proportion of total income received by different family types. This aritcle examines the relative shares of total family income for different family groups between 1970 and 1995, along with changes in the composition of these groups. It complements the family income study published in the Winter 1998 issue of perspectives.

This paper investigates the inter-provincial labour mobility behaviour of immigrants relative to that of native-born Canadians. Foreign-born Canadians differ a great deal from their domestically-born counterparts. The foreign-born population is geographically concentrated in a few provinces and a few big cities. As a whole, they are older, better educated, more likely to be married, and more likely to have dependent children and bigger households. They are less active in participating in full-time education and training. They fare relatively better in the labour market. As a result, a higher proportion of them receive social security benefits that are directly tied to the presence of dependent children or age such as family allowance benefits and pension income, but a lower proportion receive benefits that are related to labour market performance such as employment insurance benefits and social assistance benefits.

As a whole, immigrants are relatively less mobile inter-provincially. This is true both nationally and across almost every province. Among those who move to other provinces, destinations for foreign-born migrants are highly geographically concentrated. Most of them make their new homes in Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia. A significantly lower proportion of them relocate to other provinces for economic considerations but a much higher proportion move to go to school or after retirement. Earnings return to their inter-provincial migration is significantly more substantial. This is the result of both wage increase and more hours of work after migration.

Multi-variate regression results show that there are no statistically significant structural differences in the determinants of inter-provincial migration decisions between comparable foreign- and native-born Canadians. The probability of moving to other provinces, for immigrants as well as for domestically-born Canadians, is higher if earnings potentials elsewhere are relatively higher, lower if it is relatively harder to find employment elsewhere, higher among better educated workers, lower among French-speaking Canadians, lower among union members, and decreases with age, family size and job tenure. None of the proxies for government's labour market interventions significantly affect the decision to move inter-provincially. The lower mobility rates among the foreign-born are fully attributable to distributional and compositional differences between the immigrant and non-immigrant populations.

These findings have a direct policy implication on immigration selection. To encourage population and labour force growth in economically less prosperous provinces, it appears appropriate and effective to amend the current immigration selection and approval system, considering intended destinations as an additional factor and awarding additional points to applicants who choose designated provinces.

This guide presents an overview of the scope and structure of the Pension Satellite Account as well as the methodology used to derive its stocks and flows estimates.