Author Description

Using the entire (confidential) database of the 2001 Census of Canada, we consider the economic outcomes of seven groups of Aboriginal people defined along their. [...] We explore the fol- lowing dimensions of economic disadvantage: (1) conditional mean disparity, the most common indicator in the literature on economic discrimination; (2) disparity in the income return to education; (3) disparity across the conditional distribution, to assess the importance of glass ceilings for these groups; and (4) disparity across cities, to illuminate the role of co-ethnic co [...] In fact, we observe something more like a "sticky floor" (see Dolado and Llorens 2004), wherein the most severe disparity is actually at the bottom of the con- ditional earnings distribution, and disparity is smaller-though still present-at the top of the conditional earnings distribution. [...] In this work, however, we find that this is not the pattern for Aboriginal people-indeed, it seems that the greater the size of an urban Aboriginal community, the worse the economic outcomes for its members. [...] These pa- 8 MBC: Aboriginal Income Disparity in Canada pers together establish that the incomes of Aboriginal people in Canada are extremely low relative to those of non-Aboriginal population, but they do not address the question of how this disparity varies across the groups that con- stitute the Aboriginal population.