Analysis

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: 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: This fact sheet presents data on icebergs off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. The article covers reported iceberg data collected by the International Iceberg Patrol. It also covers how icebergs interact with ocean ecosystems, and the economic and cultural benefits that they provide in Newfoundland and Labrador.

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: Environment fact sheets will include short, focused, single-theme analysis on key issues within the changing environment with regards to all Canadians. Over the course of the series, analysis will include topics on: air and climate, pollution and waste, environmental protection and quality, and natural resources.

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: This infographic provides details about the number of graduates and median employment income two years after graduation for international postsecondary students, by educational qualification and field of study.

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

Description: Record linkage aims at identifying record pairs related to the same unit and observed in two different data sets, say A and B. Fellegi and Sunter (1969) suggest each record pair is tested whether generated from the set of matched or unmatched pairs. The decision function consists of the ratio between m(y) and u(y),probabilities of observing a comparison y of a set of k>3 key identifying variables in a record pair under the assumptions that the pair is a match or a non-match, respectively. These parameters are usually estimated by means of the EM algorithm using as data the comparisons on all the pairs of the Cartesian product ?=A×B. These observations (on the comparisons and on the pairs status as match or non-match) are assumed as generated independently of other pairs, assumption characterizing most of the literature on record linkage and implemented in software tools (e.g. RELAIS, Cibella et al. 2012). On the contrary, comparisons y and matching status in ? are deterministically dependent. As a result, estimates on m(y) and u(y) based on the EM algorithm are usually bad. This fact jeopardizes the effective application of the Fellegi-Sunter method, as well as automatic computation of quality measures and possibility to apply efficient methods for model estimation on linked data (e.g. regression functions), as in Chambers et al. (2015). We propose to explore ? by a set of samples, each one drawn so to preserve independence of comparisons among the selected record pairs. Simulations are encouraging.

Description: The authors used the Splink probabilistic linkage package developed by the UK Ministry of Justice, to link census data from England and Wales to itself to find duplicate census responses. A large gold standard of confirmed census duplicates was available meaning that the results of the Splink implementation could be quality assured. This paper describes the implementation and features of Splink, gives details of the settings and parameters that we used to tune Splink for our particular project, and gives the results that we obtained.

Description: Estimation at fine levels of aggregation is necessary to better describe society. Small area estimation model-based approaches that combine sparse survey data with rich data from auxiliary sources have been proven useful to improve the reliability of estimates for small domains. Considered here is a scenario where small area model-based estimates, produced at a given aggregation level, needed to be disaggregated to better describe the social structure at finer levels. For this scenario, an allocation method was developed to implement the disaggregation, overcoming challenges associated with data availability and model development at such fine levels. The method is applied to adult literacy and numeracy estimation at the county-by-group-level, using data from the U.S. Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. In this application the groups are defined in terms of age or education, but the method could be applied to estimation of other equity-deserving groups.

Description: In accordance with Statistics Canada’s long-term Disaggregated Data Action Plan (DDAP), several initiatives have been implemented into the Labour Force Survey (LFS). One of the more direct initiatives was a targeted increase in the size of the monthly LFS sample. Furthermore, a regular Supplement program was introduced, where an additional series of questions are asked to a subset of LFS respondents and analyzed in a monthly or quarterly production cycle. Finally, the production of modelled estimates based on Small Area Estimation (SAE) methodologies resumed for the LFS and will include a wider scope with more analytical value than what had existed in the past. This paper will give an overview of these three initiatives.

Description: Sampling variance smoothing is an important topic in small area estimation. In this paper, we propose sampling variance smoothing methods for small area proportion estimation. In particular, we consider the generalized variance function and design effect methods for sampling variance smoothing. We evaluate and compare the smoothed sampling variances and small area estimates based on the smoothed variance estimates through analysis of survey data from Statistics Canada. The results from real data analysis indicate that the proposed sampling variance smoothing methods work very well for small area estimation.

Description: The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is committed to improving access to more microdata, while ensuring privacy and confidentiality is maintained, through its virtual DataLab which supports researchers to undertake complex research more efficiently. Currently, the DataLab research outputs need to follow strict rules to minimise disclosure risks for clearance. However, the clerical-review process is not cost effective and has potential to introduce errors. The increasing number of statistical outputs from different projects can potentially introduce differencing risks even though these outputs from different projects have met the strict output rules. The ABS has been exploring the possibility of providing automatic output checking using the ABS cellkey methodology to ensure that all outputs across different projects are protected consistently to minimise differencing risks and reduce costs associated with output checking.

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:

This demolinguistic portrait of the French-speaking population in Canada was undertaken with the financial support of Canadian Heritage's Official Languages Secretariat, prepared by the Statistics Canada's Language Statistics Section.

This study paints a general statistical portrait of the official-language minority in Canada based on data from the Census of Population and the Survey on the Vitality of Official-language Minorities in Canada, conducted in 2006. The purpose of such a portrait is to present a set of characteristics, behaviours and perceptions of the official-language minority population, exploiting the analytical opportunities contained in the data.

Description:

The Canadian Economy in Transition is a series of new analytical reports that investigate the dynamics of industrial change in the Canadian economy. Many of these studies focus on the growth and development of industries that are often described as vanguards of the new economy, such as information and communications technology industries and science-based industries (heavy investors in research and development and human capital). Other studies examine the role that knowledge workers play in Canada's industrial evolution. In addition, future studies will investigate productivity performance in different industrial sectors.

This new series brings together a coherent set of research reports that provide users with a wide variety of empirical perspectives on the economy's changing industrial structure. These perspectives include the dynamics of productivity, profitability, employment, output, investment, occupational structure and industrial geography.

Description:

The Economic Analysis Research Paper Series provides the circulation of research conducted by the staff of National Accounts and Analytical Studies, visiting fellows and academic associates. The research paper series is meant to stimulate discussion on a range of topics including the impact of the new economy; productivity issues; firm profitability; technology usage; the effect of financing on firm growth; depreciation functions; the use of satellite accounts; savings rates; leasing; firm dynamics; hedonic estimations; diversification patterns; investment patterns; the differences in the performance of small and large, or domestic and multinational firms; and purchasing power parity estimates. Readers of the series are encouraged to contact the authors with comments, criticisms and suggestions.

The primary distribution medium for the papers is the Internet. These papers can be downloaded from the Internet at www.statcan.gc.ca for free. Papers in the series are distributed to Statistics Canada Regional Offices and provincial statistical focal points.

All papers in the Economic Analysis Series go through institutional and peer review to ensure that they conform to Statistics Canada's mandate as a government statistical agency and adhere to generally accepted standards of good professional practice.

The papers in the series often include results derived from multivariate analysis or other statistical techniques. It should be recognized that the results of these analyses are subject to uncertainty in the reported estimates.

The level of uncertainty will depend on several factors: the nature of the functional form used in the multivariate analysis; the type of econometric technique employed; the appropriateness of the statistical assumptions embedded in the model or technique; the comprehensiveness of the variables included in the analysis; and the accuracy of the data that are utilized. The peer group review process is meant to ensure that the papers in the series have followed accepted standards to minimize problems in each of these areas.

Description:

This topic presents data on the income of individuals, families, and households of Canada for the year 2010, including the composition of income, earnings and low-income prevalence data. The data also include the family and household incomes of Canadians by characteristics, family structure, household type and geography, as well as the total income and earnings levels of certain population groups (e.g., immigrants). The composition of income includes market income and income from government sources, and presents detailed components.

This topic also presents data on dwelling characteristics, including number of rooms and bedrooms, condition of dwelling, period of construction, condominium status, value of dwelling, and structural type of dwelling. Data on households are also presented, including household maintainer, housing tenure, housing subsidy, housing suitability and shelter costs.

Analytical products

Two analytical documents provide analysis on the key findings in the data, and are complemented with the short articles found in NHS in Brief and the data in the NHS Focus on Geography Series.

Data products

The NHS Profile is one data product that provides a statistical overview of user selected geographic areas based on several detailed variables and/or groups of variables. Other data products include data tables which represent a series of cross tabulations ranging in complexity and are available for various levels of geography.

Description:

This on-line report summarizes research and development (R&D) activities performed and funded by Canadian business enterprises and industrial research institutes and associations. The data are used, for instance, to plan and evaluate R&D tax incentive programs, to provide indicators of the state of industrial innovation and to complement national aggregates for scientific R&D expenditures and personnel. Among the topics covered are current and capital expenditures on research and development, energy R&D expenditures by area of technology, R&D expenditures as a percentage of company revenues, sources of funds for intramural R&D, personnel engaged in R&D, and foreign payments made and received for technological services. Most historical tables are presented for the latest five years and disaggregated by 46 industrial groupings, size of R&D program, employment size, revenue size, country of control, and by province.

Description:

This paper surveys the history of Statistics Canada's Consumer Price Index (CPI) from its origins to today. It discusses changes in the construction, scope and uses of the CPI within the context of historical events.

Description:

This reference publication on productivity in Canada shows how productivity trends affect Canadian living standards and measures the relative productivity performance of Canada and other countries. Its articles cover productivity and related issues, and it illuminates the sources underlying economic growth in Canada.

Description:

The Canadian Income Survey (CIS) is a cross-sectional survey developed to assess the economic well-being of individuals and families in Canada. It provides a portrait of the income and income sources of Canadians, with their individual and household characteristics.

Description:

Many of the 60 or so Aboriginal languages in Canada are considered endangered to varying degrees for their long-term survival. Assessing language vitality or endangerment through the measurement of various factors can provide useful information to help ensure the continuity of a language. This paper illustrates how the 2011 Census of Population and the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) can be used to measure some of the factors that provide information related to the vitality of Aboriginal languages.

Description:

Canadian Demographics at a glance is designed to gather a maximum of demographic information in a single document, giving users an easily and quickly accessible up-to-date picture of the Canadian population. It presents data on demographic growth, fertility, mortality, migratory movements, aging and ethno-cultural diversity of the population in the form of tables and graphs accompanied by a brief analytical commentary.