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