No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The research undertaken in this thesis examines social assistance (welfare) receipt in Canada during the 1981-95 period to determine the forces responsible for the dramatic growth in welfare use observed during the 1990s. The influence of changes in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, and the availability of unemployment insurance on welfare use during this period is examined using two distinct, but complementary approaches. The first approach investigates this issue from an aggregate standpoint, using Survey of Consumer Finances micro data to construct welfare usage rates for employable singles without children (male and female) and lone mothers. Separate analyses are performed for each of these sub-groups using aggregate province level data. The second approach attacks the issue from a microeconomic standpoint, employing duration analysis to examine the path leading individuals from employment to welfare receipt. Using the 1988-90 longitudinal file of the Labour Market Activity Survey, semi-parametric duration models are estimated to determine how the job loss, reemployment and welfare take-up processes are affected by incentives in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, availability of unemployment insurance as well as demographic variables. The estimates from the duration analysis are applied to administrative data on inflows of persons into the pool of non-employed to simulate and decompose rates of welfare incidence over the 1984-95 period. Results from these two approaches present a relatively consistent picture of welfare use in Canada during the 1990s. Both approaches find strong evidence of important labour market effects. Thus, the economic downturn of the early 1990s played a significant role in the growth of welfare use during this period, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. The evidence concerning the importance of interactions with the unemployment insurance system and changes in benefit generosity is mixed. Both UI effects and benefit effects are found to be important determinants of welfare use but only among specific types of families. The simulation results indicate these factors can account for only a minor amount of the variation in predicted welfare incidence in the 1990s.

In an effort to explore various difficulties in the process of reemployment, the focus of this study is how, to what extent, and in what way length of unemployment duration is generated by the interplay between the structural characteristics of the labor market and the individual characteristics of unemployed workers. The structural resources are conceptualized in terms of (1) different types of reemployment, and (2) economic sectors. It turns out that the insertion of labor market structures into research on unemployment duration is quite valuable in improving our understanding of individual reemployment behavior. / The findings show that reemployment through job recalls is relatively easier than through job switches. Even though many unemployed workers remained to benefit from the structural buffer of internal labor markets in their struggle for reemployment, workers losing core-sector jobs are found to have more difficulty in switching to a new job relative to those losing peripheral jobs. The finding illustrates a critical weakness of internal labor markets in reallocating unemployed workers. / Furthermore, the impact of the labor market location of lost jobs is also observed in both the manner and the extent to which the individual attributes of unemployed workers affect the process of reemployment. (1) More education substantially improves the reemployment chances of workers losing core-services jobs, but not workers unemployed from other sectors. (2) The reemployment probability of workers losing core-services jobs is increased with an improvement in general education whereas the reemployment probabilities of workers losing core goods-production jobs tend to increase with an accumulation in firm-specific skills. (3) Men tend to maintain their reemployment advantage through their access to internal labor markets whereas women improve their reemployment probability by benefiting from job expansion in service industries. (4) Experienced core-service workers tend to have a shorter unemployment duration than young ones when their jobs are available for recall, whereas experienced peripheral goods production workers often have a competitive disadvantage in switching to a new job. And (5) UI benefits slow down the job-recall rate substantially but have little impact on the individual behavior of searching for a new job. The problem of timing termination of unemployment duration to coincide with exhaustion of UI benefits is much more severe for the job-recall rate than for the job-switch rate.

No description available.

The research undertaken in this thesis examines social assistance (welfare) receipt in Canada during the 1981-95 period to determine the forces responsible for the dramatic growth in welfare use observed during the 1990s. The influence of changes in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, and the availability of unemployment insurance on welfare use during this period is examined using two distinct, but complementary approaches. The first approach investigates this issue from an aggregate standpoint, using Survey of Consumer Finances micro data to construct welfare usage rates for employable singles without children (male and female) and lone mothers. Separate analyses are performed for each of these sub-groups using aggregate province level data. The second approach attacks the issue from a microeconomic standpoint, employing duration analysis to examine the path leading individuals from employment to welfare receipt. Using the 1988-90 longitudinal file of the Labour Market Activity Survey, semi-parametric duration models are estimated to determine how the job loss, reemployment and welfare take-up processes are affected by incentives in welfare benefits, labour market conditions, availability of unemployment insurance as well as demographic variables. The estimates from the duration analysis are applied to administrative data on inflows of persons into the pool of non-employed to simulate and decompose rates of welfare incidence over the 1984-95 period. Results from these two approaches present a relatively consistent picture of welfare use in Canada during the 1990s. Both approaches find strong evidence of important labour market effects. Thus, the economic downturn of the early 1990s played a significant role in the growth of welfare use during this period, particularly in Ontario and Quebec. The evidence concerning the importance of interactions with the unemployment insurance system and changes in benefit generosity is mixed. Both UI effects and benefit effects are found to be important determinants of welfare use but only among specific types of families. The simulation results indicate these factors can account for only a minor amount of the variation in predicted welfare incidence in the 1990s. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

No description available.

No description available.

The findings of this thesis are somewhat at variance with the literature on Canadian public policy. The literature tends to accord primary importance in the federal policy-making process to forces such as political parties, bureaucratic groups, pressure groups, and the provinces. This study demonstrates that the political leadership of an individual cabinet minister and, subsequently, the political leadership of the government as a whole were of primary importance in the development of unemployment insurance policy in the 1970's. The policy interests of political leadership took precedence over those of other forces in the policy-making process. Moreover, the input of other forces with the exception of political parties, was negligible. Political leadership required the support of sympathizers within the major political parties to exercise leadership functions of surveillance and legitimation. / Bryce Mackasey, who introduced a new program in 1971, carried out these leadership functions so effectively that he became an agent of policy reform. Mackasey exercised surveillance over the policy-making activities of his public servants and legitimized the scheme to opponents within the major political parties, other bureaucratic groups, and the provinces. However, during the amending process, the government as a whole was not required to exercise surveillance but it successfully legitimized its policy interests to the same forces.