Canadian Immigration Policy and Immigrant Economic Outcomes: Why the Differences in Outcomes between Sweden and Canada?

Immigrants to Canada enjoy labour market outcomes that are more favourable than those for their counterparts in Sweden. In an effort to understand these gaps, Canada’s immigration policy and outcomes are contrasted to the Swedish immigration experience. The nature of immigration and structural differences involving the domestic labour markets are hypothesized to provide plausible explanations for at least some of the gap. Additionally, there are dynamic issues related to, for instance, the timing of immigrant entry with respect to the business cycle, and changes in the rates of immigration flows, that may have some impact on labour market outcomes and explain some short- to medium-term aspects of the gap in outcomes. On the other hand, common trends are also observed; both unemployment and earnings outcomes among entering immigrants have deteriorated significantly in Canada since the 1980s, as they have in many western countries including Sweden.immigration, cross-country differences, Canada, Sweden

Vulnerable Seniors: Unions, Tenure and Wages Following Permanent Job Loss

A well known finding in the literature on displaced workers is the apparent “portability” of tenure across firms: controlling for experience and other observable characteristics, workers with high levels of predisplacement tenure earn higher postdisplacement wages (e.g. Kletzer 1989). Using four data sets on displaced workers, we show that this finding is reversed for workers losing unionized jobs. Our finding cannot be explained by firm- or industry-specific human capital accumulation, deferred-pay policies, standard matching models, or by a correlation between tenure and re-entry rates into unionized jobs. We argue instead that it can reflect only two possible processes: negative selection of senior union workers, or a negative causal effect of unionism on workers’ alternative skills. An important implication of our findings is that, despite a much flatter predisplacement tenure-wage profile, displaced union workers’ wage losses increase with tenure at a comparable or higher rate to that of nonunion workers.

Assimilation and Economic Success in an Aboriginal Population: Evidence from Canada

Like immigrants, aboriginal populations are endowed with skills and cultural traits which are not necessarily optimal for economic success in the “majority” culture where they reside. As for immigrants, Aboriginal economic success may thus be enhanced by the acquistion of such skills and traits via greater contact with the majority culture. Using 1991 Canadian Census data, we document three stylized facts that support this assimilation hypothesis: Aboriginal labour market success is greater for Aboriginals whose ancestors intermarried with the non-Aboriginal population, for those who live off Indian reserves, and for those who live outside the Yukon and Northwest Territories. While each of these results, individually, could also be explained by other processes, such as differential discrimination, physical remoteness, and selection, we argue that none of these other processes can provide a convincing explanation of all three.

The Portability of New Immigrants' Human Capital: Language, Education and Occupational Matching

The implications of human capital portability -- including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching -- for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also investigate occupational mobility and observe convergence toward the occupational skill distribution of the domestic population, although four years after landing immigrants remain less likely have a high skilled job. Immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings. However, surprisingly, neither matching nor language skills have any impact on the return to pre-immigration work experience, which is observed to be statistically significantly negative. Crucially, English language skills are found to have an appreciable direct impact on earnings, and to mediate the return to pre-immigration education but not labour market experience.Immigration, human capital portability, occupation, education, language

The Portability of New Immigrants' Human Capital: Language, Education and Occupational Matching

The implications of human capital portability – including interactions between education, language skills and pre- and post-immigration occupational matching – for earnings are explored for new immigrants to Canada. Given the importance of occupation-specific skills, as a precursor we also investigate occupational mobility and observe convergence toward the occupational skill distribution of the domestic population, although four years after landing immigrants remain less likely have a high skilled job. Immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings. However, surprisingly, neither matching nor language skills have any impact on the return to pre-immigration work experience, which is observed to be statistically significantly negative. Crucially, English language skills are found to have an appreciable direct impact on earnings, and to mediate the return to pre-immigration education but not labour market experience.immigration, human capital portability, occupation, language, education

The Economic Return on New Immigrants' Human Capital: the Impact of Occupational Matching

Using a data set that provides information on source country employment, we examine the effect of source and host country occupational matching on earnings and the economic rate of return to the foreign human capital of immigrants in Canada. Examining occupational distributions we find that immigrants converge very quickly to the skill distribution of the Canadian population in terms of the main job worked, although four years after landing they are still below the source country distribution. We also find that for a large proportion of immigrants, their intended occupation differs from their source country occupation. Although immigrants who are able to match their source and host country occupations obtain higher earnings, successful occupational matching does not have any impact on the return to foreign potential work experience. However, immigrants who match their source and host country occupations do have a higher return to schooling, particularly for females.Immigrants, Occupational Matching, Human Capital, Canada

Ontario’s Experiment with Primary Care Reform

For the past decade-and-a-half, the government of Ontario has been implementing sweeping reforms in an effort to improve primary health care delivery. Altering physician-compensation models is central to this initiative. One measure of the scale of change is that in 2000 roughly 95 per cent of general/family practitioners were paid traditional fee-for-service, but by 2013 that proportion had plunged to just 28 per cent. The province has clearly succeeded in largely replacing the traditional fee-for-service payment structure with blended payment models that are mostly group-oriented and include: 1) capitation (in some cases): a single payment for providing a particular “basket” of services to a patient for a fixed period, for example a year, regardless of the number of services provided, 2) fee-for-service payment, for services outside the capitated basket and provided in special situations, and 3) various bonuses and incentives (sometimes called pay-for-performance) that mostly focus on preventive care and the management of chronic conditions. Physicians in rural and northern areas, as well as some clinics, also have salary and similar models as options. Ontario has simultaneously introduced patient “rostering” — the formalized connecting of one patient to one physician and/or physician team/group — creating a relationship better suited to delivering preventive healthcare services. However, when surveyed, many patients are unaware that they have been “rostered” meaning that at present much of the benefit must be derived from the physician side alone. It remains to be seen whether or not it is important for patients to be aware that they are rostered. Beyond its clinical benefits, rostering has appreciable rhetorical and political value, as well as potential as a planning tool in efforts to ensure that the local and provincial supply of primary care is appropriate. In a health-care system as large and complex as Ontario’s, reform is more evolutionary than revolutionary; but the province has arguably moved rapidly within this context. Expenditures have been substantial and the initiatives groundbreaking. However, the same challenges that make reform a formidable undertaking also make it difficult to readily, or quickly, measure success, especially since many changes are ongoing. It is not yet demonstrably clear to what degree the government’s goals are being achieved. At present, there are mixed and conflicting findings about whether some of these changes have moved the health system towards the intended goals of improving health-care access and quality, and patient satisfaction, let alone whether the potential improvements can justify the resources expended to achieve them. Naturally, those results we do have at this point offer insight only into the short-term effects of these changes. Especially, it is too early for sufficient evidence to have accumulated on the impact of new physician-group models on downstream costs, including drug prescriptions, specialist care, hospital costs and the use of diagnostic tests. These are, however, central questions that will in large part determine success. Also, it appears that the Ontario government could have accomplished nearly all of its goals so far without having implemented capitation, although capitation may prove beneficial in the longer term as the scarcity of physicians since the 1990s seems to be shifting towards a surplus. In this new era, the health ministry will likely need to take a more hands-on role than it has in the past, including improved system monitoring. Going forward many stakeholders should be involved in evaluating this experiment on an ongoing basis to ensure that it is serving the healthcare needs of the population in an effective and efficient way.

The Impact of Placing Adolescent Males into Foster Care on their Education, Income Assistance and Incarcerations

Understanding the causal impacts of taking youth on the margins of risk into foster care is an element of the evidence-base on which policy development for this crucial function of government relies. Yet, there is little research looking at these causal impacts; neither is there much empirical work looking at long-term outcomes. This paper focuses on estimating the impact of placing 16 to 18 year old male youth into care on their rates of high school graduation, and post-majority income assistance receipt and incarceration. Two distinct sources of exogenous variation are used to generate instrumental variables, the estimates from which are interpreted in a heterogeneous treatment effects framework as local average treatment effects (LATEs). And, indeed, each source of exogenous variation is observed to estimate different parameters. While both instruments are in accord in that placement in foster care reduces (or delays) high school graduation, the impact of taking youth into care on income assistance use has dramatically different magnitudes across the two margins explored, and, perhaps surprisingly, one source of exogenous variation causes an increase, and the other a decrease, in the likelihood of the youth being incarcerated by age 20. Our results suggest that it is not enough to ask whether more or fewer children should be taken into care; rather, which children are, and how they are, taken into care matter for long-term outcomes.foster care, local average treatment effects

The Review of Economic Performance and Social Progress 2002: Towards a Social Understanding of Productivity

Skills, innovation and human capital as they feature prominently on the policy agenda of industrialized countries concerned with productivity and competitiveness issues. Not surprisingly, formal education is the preferred and most conventional policy instrument of governments in pursuing these objectives. Indeed, "more is better" is often the guiding principle here. The actual linkages, however, are not as straightforward as they may appear. Certainly, there are gains to be achieved through a better understanding of the relationship between the skills developed through formal education and their causal impact on productivity, as well as a more nuanced approach to policy in this area. In this chapter, Arthur Sweetman points out, "the issue is not whether education has benefits but, rather, the magnitude of its 'true' benefits, the benefits relative to costs, and the distribution of costs and benefits. Sweetman examines three different sets of evidence, focusing on the impact of education on earnings at the individual level and on productivity at the macroeconomic level, and on issues related to the operation of the Canadian educational system.Education, Skills, Growth, Productivity, Labour Productivity, Labor Productivity, Educational Attainment, Human Capital, Knowledge, Quality, Education Quality, Private Benefit, Social Benefit, Value, Investment

Characterizing No-shows in the Omani Primary Healthcare Setting

Objectives: Patient ‘no-shows’ (failure to keep or cancel appointments) is a global problem that impacts healthcare systems by delaying patient access to healthcare, reducing quality of care, and wasting resources. The no-show phenomenon has not yet been studied in Oman despite it having grown in importance ever since the appointments system was implemented in 2014. This study aimed to characterize the no-shows in primary healthcare facilities in Oman. Methods: We collected and analyzed administrative data during the period 2014–2017 from 14 primary healthcare institutions in Oman focusing on the ophthalmology, ear, nose, and throat, and dermatology clinics therein. Results: The overall no-show rates were > 50.0%. No-show probabilities were higher in males, younger adults, new appointments, early morning appointments, appointments during Ramadan, and appointments scheduled farther in advance. Patient experience with the appointment system reduced the no-show probability. Conclusions: Policymakers should consider these trends to optimize the number of appointments per day, and researchers should further investigate no-shows for other specialties and levels of care