this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
117 points (96.1% liked)

Canada

7200 readers
300 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


🗺️ Provinces / Territories


🏙️ Cities / Local Communities


🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


💻 Universities


💵 Finance / Shopping


🗣️ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A new economic report from TD says Canada is falling behind the standard-of-living curve compared to its peers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While in no way intending to minimize the economic hardship inflation has had on Canadian’s lives, to be clear, this is ‘standard of living’ defined as real GDP per capita.

That is it measures the arithmetic mean or average of what the economy produces adjusted for general inflation. It says nothing about how income or wealth is distributed or other key factors that determine wellbeing at an individual, household or societal level.

This is not generally viewed as the best measure of quality of life or societal wellbeing. Critics from across the political spectrum globally have been critical of the focus on GDP per capita for decades. It says something that TD as a bank is still focused on it.

The OECD Finance Ministers adopted a Wellbeing Framework to measure and compare across countries. Canada has its own version that StatsCan is reporting on.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for pointing that out! GDP figures are easy to collect and analyze which is why economists like them so much, but you're absolutely right that they don't show the entire picture.

For wealth inequality, the Gini Coefficient is a common measure. In the linked wiki article you can see Canada is in line with the UK and Germany for being middle of the road whereas places like US, Russia, and Saudia Arabia have incredibly high income inequality.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

The OECD Wellbeing Framework uses both the GINI and a measure of health disparities (differential in life expectancy) as measures of equity.

There is a significant consensus that if a country were to look at a single measure alone, trends and changes in life satisfaction would be the best one. For comparisons between countries, it’s less helpful though.