Measuring Voluntary Inter-household Transfers in Canada
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by Jackson Chung
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Alison Hale and Brian Murphy for their input, comments, and support. He is also grateful for comments provided by Diane Galarneau, Sébastien Larochelle-Côté, Ted Wannell, Chantal Hicks, Yan Feng, Paul Roberts, and participants at the at the Statistics Canada Socio-economic Conference held in Gatineau in April 2010.
Abstract
Households provide money, goods and services directly to help other households: these inter-household transfers add up to a sizable flow of economic resources between households. While measured by Statistics Canada surveys, inter-household transfers are not included in the recipient household's total income—except court-ordered alimony and child support payments. Because inter-household transfers affect a household's ability to consume goods (Smeeding and Weinburg, 2001), they are important in measuring a household's economic well-being. This paper examines the conceptual and measurement issues related to voluntary inter-household transfers, and provides a portrait of voluntary inter-household transfer in Canada. This paper uses the recent data on inter-household transfers from Statistics Canada's income, expenditure, and wealth surveys.
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