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| 08.05.2008 | ||
Regarding our PerfectCity Charter we have just started a new poll. This time we want to know what is most important about the economic environment in the City of The Future. To get a little deeper into that issue we want to focus on an interesting index, the so called economic environment index.
The Atlas of Canada site, a website where you can discover Canada through national maps and facts, has a wide range of different maps. There you can find map which displays the quality of life through an economic environment index in Canada.
This map shows the quality of the economic environment: the environment in which people engage in, and benefit from, economic activity that includes aspects of paid employment and household finances. The indicators of the economic environment measure the ability of households to access goods and services important to quality of life. To asses the quality of the economic environment seven indicators are used (you can find some of them as factors to vote for in our poll) regarding household finances and employment/paid work. These indicators are:
- Average owner’s major payments (inverse)
- Percentage of income from government transfer payments (inverse)
- Ratio of percentage of households in lowest income category to that of households in highest income category (inverse)
- Percentage incidence of low income families (inverse)
- Ratio of individuals working part year, part time to individuals working full year, full time (inverse)
- Unemployment rate (inverse
- Average employment income (direct)
Regarding the methodology, five classes have been used to map the quality of the economic environment: low, fair, moderate, good and high. “Moderate” means that quality of life can be seen as the average, whereas ‘low’ is well below the average and ‘high’ is well above average. A ‘low’ classification for a community implies that it scored low on all indicators of the economic environment; conversely, a community with a ‘high’ classification more than likely scored above average on all indicators. The score for each community (or census subdivision) was calculated using a methodology called the standard score additive method.
Map Showing the Distribution of the Economic Quality of Life for Toronto, Ontario and Surrounding Area © Natural Resources Canada. 2003. Quality of Life: Economic Environment Index [ Map]. Ottawa: Natural Resources Canada.
Across Canada, the distribution in the economic quality of life is varied. In most provinces, the northern areas vary from low to high, except in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador, which generally show moderate to low. The areas that score high in the north are larger unconsolidated communities or districts, such as Stikine Regional District in northern British Columbia and the James Bay unconsolidated area in northern Quebec. Most of the northern areas with high values, such as Wood Buffalo, Alberta, have very high average employment incomes compared to the average incomes in other rural areas in the south (for example, Eldon, New Brunswick). The geographic pattern at a larger scale in the south shows the distribution of the urban cities, which are generally low to moderate, and the surrounding urban areas, which show good to high.
One possible explanation for this pattern is that the urban centres of a larger metropolitan area possess a more diverse population than the cities surrounding larger metropolitan areas (such as Nepean, located outside what was, in 1996, the city of Ottawa, and Oakville, located outside Toronto) in terms of households with varied average incomes, greater differences in household income distribution, and greater levels of unemployment. All of this variance in the range of values for each these indicators contributes to a lower overall quality of the economic environment.
If you are interested in more about the economic environment index including various zoom mapping tools to zoom into different locations across Canada to compare the quality of economic environment from region to region, click here. You can also find more figures and statistics.
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