Author(s)
Miles Corak

Intergenerational income mobility varies significantly across Canada, with the landscape clustering into four broad regions. These are not geographically contiguous, and provincial boundaries are not the dividing lines. The important exception is Manitoba, which has noticeably less intergenerational mobility among eight indicators derived from a large administrative data set for a cohort of men and women born between 1963 and 1970. These indicators are derived for each of the 266 Census Divisions in the 1986 Canadian Census. They show that higher mobility communities are located in Southwestern Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, and tend to be correlated with lower poverty, less income inequality, and a higher share of immigrants.

JEL Codes
D63: Equity; Justice; Inequality; and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
J61: Geographic Labor Mobility; Immigrant Workers
J62: Job, Occupational, and Intergenerational Mobility; Promotion
Keywords
intergenerational mobility
equality of opportunity
geography