Analysis

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: The purpose of this document is to define the concept of peer groups, to give an overview of how they are created and to demonstrate their usefulness. This paper presents the 2023 classification of the peer groups.

Description: The Health Research Working Paper Series publishes: analytical work-in-progress; background documentation for specific research projects (e.g methodological papers); lengthy reports intended for specific clients, and; compendiums of data tables. Publication in this series does not preclude publication of specific aspects of the work in a peer-reviewed journal.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This paper investigates the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on inbound visitors to Canada, and their tourism-related spending, covering the period from 2018 to 2023.

Description: This study examines the economic footprint created by the Canadian research and development pharmaceutical sector on the Canadian economy in 2021, including a focus on the contribution of Innovative Medicines Canada’s members. While the impact of the sector’s medical research is well known, less known are the economic impacts of the sector on the Canadian economy, such as the value generated, the jobs supported and the investments made.

Description: The papers published in the Analysis in Brief analytical series shed light on current economic issues. Aimed at a general audience, they cover a wide range of topics including National Accounts, business enterprises, trade, transportation, agriculture, the environment, manufacturing, science and technology, services, etc.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: This article takes a closer look into the largest contributors and detractors to growth in each province and territory in 2023. Using data from the May 1, 2024 provincial and territorial GDP by industry release as a starting point, a more comprehensive picture of each jurisdiction’s 2023 economic performance is presented by integrating other economic indicators such as population, prices and labour market measures, and by examining the context in which industries grew or contracted during the reference period.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: We can try our best, but its not always easy knowing what's best for the environment. The world is complicated, and it isn't as simple as reduce, reuse, recycle—though that's a great place to start! In the immortal words of Kermit the Frog, "It's not easy bein' green."

We have two stories exploring that theme. The first is one we made in-house asking just how green our digital world really is, and the second comes from the Simply Science podcast exploring the world of urban forests.

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Release published in The Daily – Statistics Canada’s official release bulletin

Description: Using data from the 2022 Time Use Survey, this infographic provides highlights from the study “Telework, time use, and well-being: Evidence from the 2022 Time Use Survey.” Data about the differences in time use between teleworkers and non-teleworkers are shown, particularly where time saved on the commute to and from work is reallocated to other activities such as time spent with children. The infographic also shows the differences in satisfaction with work-life balance when comparing the two groups.

Description: With the availability of larger and more diverse data sources, Statistical Institutes in Europe are inclined to publish statistics on smaller groups than they used to do. Moreover, high impact global events like the Covid crisis and the situation in Ukraine may also ask for statistics on specific subgroups of the population. Publishing on small, targeted groups not only raises questions on statistical quality of the figures, it also raises issues concerning statistical disclosure risk. The principle of statistical disclosure control does not depend on the size of the groups the statistics are based on. However, the risk of disclosure does depend on the group size: the smaller a group, the higher the risk. Traditional ways to deal with statistical disclosure control and small group sizes include suppressing information and coarsening categories. These methods essentially increase the (mean) group sizes. More recent approaches include perturbative methods that have the intention to keep the group sizes small in order to preserve as much information as possible while reducing the disclosure risk sufficiently. In this paper we will mention some European examples of special focus group statistics and discuss the implications on statistical disclosure control. Additionally, we will discuss some issues that the use of perturbative methods brings along: its impact on disclosure risk and utility as well as the challenges in proper communication thereof.

Description: The publication of more disaggregated data can increase transparency and provide important information on underrepresented groups. Developing more readily available access options increases the amount of information available to and produced by researchers. Increasing the breadth and depth of the information released allows for a better representation of the Canadian population, but also puts a greater responsibility on Statistics Canada to do this in a way that preserves confidentiality, and thus it is helpful to develop tools which allow Statistics Canada to quantify the risk from the additional data granularity. In an effort to evaluate the risk of a database reconstruction attack on Statistics Canada’s published Census data, this investigation follows the strategy of the US Census Bureau, who outlined a method to use a Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solver to reconstruct individual attributes of residents of a hypothetical US Census block, based just on a table of summary statistics. The technique is expanded to attempt to reconstruct a small fraction of Statistics Canada’s Census microdata. This paper will discuss the findings of the investigation, the challenges involved in mounting a reconstruction attack, and the effect of an existing confidentiality measure in mitigating these attacks. Furthermore, the existing strategy is compared to other potential methods used to protect data – in particular, releasing tabular data perturbed by some random mechanism, such as those suggested by differential privacy.

Description: Education and training is acknowledged as fundamental for the development of a society. It is a complex multidimensional phenomenon, which determinants are ascribable to several interrelated familiar and socio-economic conditions. To respond to the demand of supporting statistical information for policymaking and its monitoring and evaluation process, the Italian National Statistical Institute (Istat) is renewing the education and training statistical production system, implementing a new thematic statistical register. It will be part of the Istat Integrated System of Registers, thus allowing relating the education and training phenomenon to other relevant phenomena, e.g. transition to work.

Description: Growing Up in Québec is a longitudinal population survey that began in the spring of 2021 at the Institut de la statistique du Québec. Among the children targeted by this longitudinal follow-up, some will experience developmental difficulties at some point in their lives. Those same children often have characteristics associated with higher sample attrition (low-income family, parents with a low level of education). This article describes the two main challenges we encountered when trying to ensure sufficient representativeness of these children, in both the overall results and the subpopulation analyses.

Description: In 2021, Statistics Canada initiated the Disaggregated Data Action Plan, a multi-year initiative to support more representative data collection methods, enhance statistics on diverse populations to allow for intersectional analyses, and support government and societal efforts to address known inequalities and bring considerations of fairness and inclusion into decision making. As part of this initiative, we are building the Survey Series on People and their Communities, a new probabilistic panel specifically designed to collect data that can be disaggregated according to racialized group. This new tool will allow us to address data gaps and emerging questions related to diversity. This paper will give an overview of the design of the Survey Series on People and their Communities.

Description: At Statistics Netherlands (SN) for some economic sectors two partly-independent intra-annual turnover index series are available: a monthly series based on survey data and a quarterly series based on value added tax data for the smaller units and re-used survey data for the other units. SN aims to benchmark the monthly turnover index series to the quarterly census data on a quarterly basis. This cannot currently be done because the tax data has a different quarterly pattern: the turnover is relatively large in the fourth quarter of the year and smaller in the first quarter. With the current study we aim to describe this deviating quarterly pattern at micro level. In the past we developed a mixture model using absolute turnover levels that could explain part of the quarterly patterns. Because the absolute turnover levels differ between the two series, in the current study we use a model based on relative quarterly turnover levels within a year.

Description: Respondents to typical household surveys tend to significantly underreport their potential use of food aid distributed by associations. This underreporting is most likely related to the social stigma felt by people experiencing great financial difficulty. As a result, survey estimates of the number of recipients of that aid are much lower than the direct counts from the associations. Those counts tend to overestimate due to double counting. Through its adapted protocol, the Enquête Aide alimentaire (EAA) collected in late 2021 in France at a sample of sites of food aid distribution associations, controls the biases that affect the other sources and determines to what extent this aid is used.

Description: Ethnic minorities are often underrepresented in survey research, due to the challenges many researchers face in including these populations. While some studies discuss several methods in comparison, few have directly compared these methods empirically, leaving researchers seeking to include ethnic minorities in their studies unsure of their best options. In this article, I briefly review the methodological and ethical reasons for increasing ethnic minority representation in social science research, as well as challenges of doing so. I then present findings from ten studies which empirically compare methods of sampling and/or recruiting ethnic minority individuals. Finally, I discuss some implications for future research.

Description: We present design-based Horvitz-Thompson and multiplicity estimators of the population size, as well as of the total and mean of a response variable associated with the elements of a hidden population to be used with the link-tracing sampling variant proposed by Félix-Medina and Thompson (2004). Since the computation of the estimators requires to know the inclusion probabilities of the sampled people, but they are unknown, we propose a Bayesian model which allows us to estimate them, and consequently to compute the estimators of the population parameters. The results of a small numeric study indicate that the performance of the proposed estimators is acceptable.

Description: To overcome the traditional drawbacks of chain sampling methods, the sampling method called “network sampling with memory” was developed. Its unique feature is to recreate, gradually in the field, a frame for the target population composed of individuals identified by respondents and to randomly draw future respondents from this frame, thereby minimizing selection bias. Tested for the first time in France between September 2020 and June 2021, for a survey among Chinese immigrants in Île-de-France (ChIPRe), this presentation describes the difficulties encountered during collection—sometimes contextual, due to the pandemic, but mostly inherent to the method.

Description:

These highlights provide a brief summary of the report "At risk: a socio-economic analysis of health and literacy among seniors", the latest monograph released using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey. This report demonstrates that the socio-economic environment remains an important determinant of health. Variables such as income and education continue to have direct and indirect effects on people's health status.

Description:

The contributors to this book examine two broad themes related to the well-being of Canadian youth. First, they document the nature of the labour market facing young adults and how it has changed since the early 1970s. Second, the authors examine how families, communities, and the public sector influence some of the ways in which children become successful and self-reliant adults. The motivation for bringing these essays together has to do with the increasing importance of child well-being in public discourse and the development of public policy. The major message to emerge is that the future of Canada's children is both a good news, and a bad news story. Labour markets have changed dramatically, and on average it is now more difficult to obtain a strong foothold that will lead to increasing prosperity. Many young Canadians, however, are well prepared by their family and community backgrounds to deal with these new challenges, and as young parents are in a position to pass this heritage on to their children. However, this has not been the case for an increasingly larger minority, a group whose children in turn may face greater than average challenges in getting ahead in life. A companion volume published in February of 1998 by Statistics Canada called Government finances and generational equity examines the operation of government taxes and transfers from a generational perspective, focusing on the conduct of fiscal policy and the relative status of individuals in successive generations.

Description:

These highlights provide a brief summary of the report "Literacy utilization in Canadian workplaces", the latest monograph released using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey. This report examines the fit or mismatch between the job requirements of Canadian workers and their literacy skills, thus profiling patterns of literacy usage and under- usage in the Canadian labour market.

Description:

This report, based on results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), focuses on changes in the family environment, specifically, common-law unions, custody arrangements and financial issues. The NLSCY is a comprehensive survey which will follow the development of children in Canada and paint a picture of their lives.

Description:

These highlights provide a brief summary of the report " The Value of Words: Literacy and Economic Security in Canada", the latest monograph released using data from the International Adult Literacy Survey. Canada, like many other industrialized countries, is increasingly being forced to face the literacy problem within its own borders. Over the past decade, the issue has become more prominent on the national policy and research agenda. There has been little systematic research in Canada, however, on the relationship between literacy and income security. Using data from the Canadian component of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS), this study seeks to fill this research gap. An in-depth exploration of the links between literacy and economic security will build on existing knowledge and will also provide useful insights that will help shape public policy.

Description:

This publication presents data, charts, map and analytical text on trips and socio-economic characteristics of Canadians travelling within Canada. Trip information includes purpose, activities, mode of transportation, length of stay, origin and destination, and expenditures. In addition to providing national data, the publication also includes some tables presenting provincial and metropolitan detail.

Description:

Based on a presentation by Dr. Ivan Fellegi to the Federal Deputy Ministers' Committee on the Economic Renewal of Rural Canada in September l996, Understanding rural Canada uses charts and maps to present information on: rural demography showing population change and net migration by census division for the most recent 5-year period (l989 to l994); a focus on rural youth including information on education attained, plans for further education and ablility to use computers; rural employment, rural unemployment, rural employment in growing sectors and rural employment by small businesses; a classification of census divisions by level of average incomes and change in average incomes to show that many rural areas have lower incomes and their incomes are falling further behind; and, a typology of census divisions where rural areas are classified to rural nirvana areas, agro-rural areas, rural enclave areas, rural resourced areas and native north areas. This presentation was an outgrowth of the publication Rural Canada: a profile published by the federal Interdepartmental Committee on Rural and Remote Canada in March, l995.

Description:

Bankruptcy rates have been increasing in Canada. Almost half of the firms in Canada that go bankrupt do so primarily because of their own deficiencies rather than externally generated problems. They do not develop the basic internal strengths to survive. Overall weakness in management, combined with a lack of market for their product, cause these firms to fail.

This study suggests that the underlying factor contributing to financial difficulties is management failure rather than external factors associated with imperfect capital markets. Many bankrupt firms face problems in attaining financing in capital markets; but, it is the internal lack of managerial expertise in many of these firms that prevents exploration of different financing options.

Description:

"Generational equity" is a topic that has gradually risen higher and higher on the agenda of governments at all levels. In fact, it is a matter not just for government policy, but a topic that touches many Canadians directly: young and old, parents and grandparents. Canadian policy makers increasingly have to deal with issues associated with the relative status of individuals between successive generations. The reform of public pension programs presents the most obvious example, but there are many other developments that raise the same type of issue. Indeed, the heightened concern over government fiscal policies is due in large part to the readiness of many to view government deficits and debt as a burden on future generations. Generational equity, however, is also a concern of individual Canadians and their families. The allocation of resources between the young and the old within the family is becoming an increasingly important issue for many, especially in light not only of an aging population but also the belief that those just entering the labour force will likely not attain the standard of living to which their parents have become accustomed.

The contributors to this book examine the operation of government taxes and expenditures from a generational perspective. In part the motivation for bringing these essays together is to offer comprehensive and up-to-date information on the age incidence of government finances. This motivation, however, also has to do with the development of a new accounting framework, Generational Accounting, that has gained some currency in many industrialized countries, particularly in the United States. It is a truism to say that good analysis requires good data, and certainly Statistic Canada's central role is to offer high-quality data in support of analysis and decision making. But the opposite is equally true, if not as obvious: good data requires good analysis. That is to say, new analytical frameworks often highlight the need to organize existing data in different ways, as well as the need for the development of new types of data. This is certainly one of several reasons that Statistics Canada has sought to develop a strong analytical capacity, and to maintain strong ties with the research community. This book is meant to contribute to this process by examining Canadian data through the lens of Generational Accounting, and by analyzing some of the issues that arise.

Description:

On September 11 and 12, 1996 Statistics Canada's Business and Trade Statistics Field sponsored its eight annual conference on statistics and economic analysis in Ottawa. The theme of the conference was Canadian Economic Structural Change in the Age of NAFTA. Guest speakers and submitted papers discussed a variety of topics related to economic restructuring and the NAFTA.