Extension of social transfers in kind

Social transfers in kind (STiK) adds valuable information to the understanding of social inequality, especially in international comparisons. STiK is integrated into the Distributions of Household Economic Accounts (DHEA) which provides additional granularity to address questions such as vulnerabilities of specific groups and the resulting implications for economic wellbeing and financial stability. It is recommended to incorporate the national accounts concept of adjusted disposable income into distributional household data.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Expert Group on Disparities in a National Account framework (EG DNA) recommends STiK to be grouped by education, health, and other. Health related spending is highly age dependent, therefore by allocating STiK related to health is an example how the integration of STiK into DHEA will add richness to the data. The data will help distinguish social transfers in kind provided to children (ex. education), to the elderly (ex. health care), and on a regional basis.

This is done by relying on as much socio-demographic information as possible to refine individual allocations. We use data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) for health expenditures by age and by province to help with distributing health related STiK. Other proxies used to distribute education STiK is age and tuition fees paid by households. Other STiK categories are distributed using a blend of proxies selected at a more detail level. An example of this is union dues paid by households to distribute STiK related to labour organization services. Details for the proxies used to distribute STiK can be found in the appendix.

The DHEA extends back to 1999 which means STiK is back casted to cover the same time frame. Wages and salary data from T4 remuneration files is used to back cast STiK from NPISH and historical estimates submitted to the OECD is used to back cast STiK from government.

Future work will include improving the allocators used for distributing STiK as well as refining the decomposition of “Other STiK”. As well, we aim to develop distributions by more detailed household characteristics.