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Written by CCPA
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Sunday, 06 September 2009 |
For the
past thirty years, the richest in the province have secured the lion's share of
Saskatchewan's economic growth, while those at the lower end of the income
spectrum have made few or no gains over the same period.
That is the conclusion of the Saskatchewan CCPA's new
report: Boom and Bust: The Growing Income
Gap in Saskatchewan.
The report's author - Paul Gingrich, retired professor
of Sociology and Social Studies at the University of Regina - finds that the
gap between the richest and poorest families in Saskatchewan has increased
dramatically over the past generation and has mushroomed since 2000 - during
the best of economic times.
In 2006, Saskatchewan’s after-tax income gap was the
third worst in all of Canada. Mirroring trends in all Canadian provinces,
inequality of earnings increased among Saskatchewan families over the thirty
years from 1976 to 2006.Over this
period, the richest 10 per cent of Saskatchewan families took home the lion’s
share of the province’s economic growth, increasing its share of earnings from
twenty-three to twenty-eight per cent. The bottom half of Saskatchewan families
found themselves shut out from economic gains and their share of earnings
dropped from twenty-six to twenty-three percent.
There is a growing divide between the top half of
Saskatchewan families and those in the bottom half:in the 2003-2006 period, the share of earnings going to the
top half was four times greater than earnings going to the bottom half.
Equally troubling, by 2005 the income gap associated
with being Aboriginal was very large, with Aboriginal individuals averaging
less than sixty per cent of their non-Aboriginal counterparts.Since Statistics Canada’s income
surveys exclude the Aboriginal population living on reserves, the findings of
this report likely understate overall income inequality in Saskatchewan. Download the Report/Study:
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Last Updated ( Sunday, 06 September 2009 )
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