The aim of this thesis is to investigate the existing pattern and changing trend of the distribution of wealth in today's Canada. In doing so I explore both theoretical accounts and empirical evidence. First, the theoretical perspectives of both classical (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) and contemporary (Blumberg, Westergaard and Resler, Porter, and Clement) social thinkers were discussed. The objective of this review was to describe the sociological interpretations and explanations of the distribution of wealth. Second, existing evidence was reviewed and new data was gathered on the wealth distribution in Canada. The existing data came from Osberg, Hunter, Vaillancourt, Rashid, and Oja. New data concerning such issues as welfare state, income disparity, and important wealth components was examined to augment the previously existing data. The Canadian wealth distribution proved to be unequal and to have become slightly more unequal over time. The concluding chapter briefly reviews possible explanations for this set of findings. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

This thesis analyses the evolution of informal and formal, private and public income security mechanisms in Canada from the beginning of the colonial period to the present. These programs generally deal with three categories of problems: problems stemming from interruptions of production income due to sickness, accident, premature death of the breadwinner or caused by retirement or unemployment; problems related to non-participation in the labour force such as those encountered by mothers who stay home with their children, children themselves, students, handicapped people and individuals who due to age can no longer enter the labour force; problems related to insufficiency of production income which are usually the problems of low wage earners. This thesis studies mainly the income security programs designed to correct the first two types of economic dependency. / Three main theoretical hypotheses emerge from the economic analysis of the evolution in historical time of income security mechanisms. First, the types of economic dependency which those programs try to deal with are generally collective problems of income distribution or, in other words, income transfers problems; they are not individual problems of saving, neither are they intertemporal income allocation problems. Second, in the field of income security, the institutions of the private sector do not have the economic power to efficiently implement the income security programs desired. Third, the income security collective strategies are deeply influenced by the collective values of Canadian society; therefore, the form that State intervention takes in the field of income security obeys the necessities and the constraints of these values. In addition to the influence of collective values, this thesis discusses the impact of macroeconomic stabilization policies on the evolution of income security programs. / The hypotheses presented in this thesis are original in comparison to the current literature. Indeed an important number of authors consider economic dependency as being principally an individual problem of intertemporal allocation of income and not a collective problem of income distribution. Few of them study the relative efficiency of different economic institutions in providing appropriate income security programs. And finally, many authors ignore the role of collective values.

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This thesis first presents a general procedure for decomposing income inequality measures by income source. The first method draws on the literature of ethical social index numbers to construct a decomposition based on a weighted sum of the inequality indices for the respective component distributions. The second method is based on the Shap- ley value of transferable utility cooperative games. The ethical and technical properties of the decompositions are examined, showing that the interactive technique has some previously known decompositions as special cases. In the third chapter I examine the contribution of differences in educational attain- ment to earnings inequality using the interactive decomposition by factor sources, intro- duced in chapter two, of the Atkinson-Kolm-Sen inequality index. I first use an estimated sample-selection model to decompose predicted labour earnings of a random sample of Canadians into a base level and a part due to returns to education. I do this decomposi- tion once ignoring the effect education has on the probability of being employed and once accounting for this fact. I then calculate the contribution of these two sources of earnings to inequality measured by a S-Gini index of relative inequality for the full sample as well as two separate age cohorts. The results indicate that approximately one half to two thirds of measured inequality can be directly attributed to returns to education while the interaction between the two sources post-secondary. The fourth chapter uses the earnings model from the third chapter to conduct policy simulations for broadly based policies, low targeted policies, and high targeted policies. I demonstrate that the policies targeting low education individuals produce a larger increase in social welfare than do the other two types of policy.

This thesis first presents a general procedure for decomposing income inequality measures by income source. The first method draws on the literature of ethical social index numbers to construct a decomposition based on a weighted sum of the inequality indices for the respective component distributions. The second method is based on the Shap- ley value of transferable utility cooperative games. The ethical and technical properties of the decompositions are examined, showing that the interactive technique has some previously known decompositions as special cases. In the third chapter I examine the contribution of differences in educational attain- ment to earnings inequality using the interactive decomposition by factor sources, intro- duced in chapter two, of the Atkinson-Kolm-Sen inequality index. I first use an estimated sample-selection model to decompose predicted labour earnings of a random sample of Canadians into a base level and a part due to returns to education. I do this decomposi- tion once ignoring the effect education has on the probability of being employed and once accounting for this fact. I then calculate the contribution of these two sources of earnings to inequality measured by a S-Gini index of relative inequality for the full sample as well as two separate age cohorts. The results indicate that approximately one half to two thirds of measured inequality can be directly attributed to returns to education while the interaction between the two sources post-secondary. The fourth chapter uses the earnings model from the third chapter to conduct policy simulations for broadly based policies, low targeted policies, and high targeted policies. I demonstrate that the policies targeting low education individuals produce a larger increase in social welfare than do the other two types of policy. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate