The temporal evolution of income polarization in Canada's largest CMAs.

Lazar Ilic,M Sawada,Celine Rozenblat

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0251430

Abstract

Income polarization is a pressing issue which is increasingly discussed by academics and policymakers. The present research examines income polarization in Canada’s eight largest Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) using data at the census-tract (CT) level between 1971 and 2016. Generally, there are significant decreasing trends in the middle-income population with simultaneously increasing trends in low-income groups. The high-income groups have been relatively stable with fewer significant increasing population trends. Using conventional mapping and cartograms, patterns of the spatial evolution of income inequality are illustrated. Every CMA examined contains an increasing trend of spatial fragmentation at the patch level within each CMA’s landscape mosaic. The results of a spatial autocorrelation analysis at the sub-patch, CT level, exhibit significant spatial clustering of high-income CTs as one process that dominates the increasingly fragmented landscape mosaic.

Highlights

We modeled the linear trend of the mean of the three bandwidths and derived a slope value to assess if the particular Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs) exhibited rise or decline in each income group over time
All CMAs have significant positive trends for the low-income group under either household income (Table 1) or individual income (Table 2), with the exception of Quebec City in the latter. Given that these are proportions weighted by the number of households, the low-income group is expanding within most CMAs at the cost of the middle-income group
Amongst OECD countries, Canada has seen the highest increase of income inequality in recent years [3, 45, 48,49,50,51,52]

Summary

Introduction

As a popular element of social justice [1], inequality is exacerbated through uneven development at a multitude of spatial scales, exposing the contrasts between haves and have-nots. Whereas some studies concerning inequality focus on an international or national scale [2], recent research increasingly includes local income polarization at regional and urban scales [3,4,5,6,7,8]. In the Canadian context, a network of researchers who are part of the Neighbourhood Change Research Project conducted a number of studies on income inequality in select Canadian cities, the results of which are summarized in a recent publication [9]. We refer to, their methodological approach as the Three City Project (TCP), due to their utilization of what has come to be known as the Three City Model (TCM)

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion