I'll make this quick.
Why are low-income rates declining among lone parents? We asked that question, and after so many years we noticed that employment earnings were rising and employment rates were rising among lone parents. Why was that? Basically we found two things. One, the change was concentrated among older lone parents, those over 40, in Canada. Secondly, it had a lot to do with demographic change.
Lone parents are very different kinds of people now as compared to 20 years ago. They're much better educated and have more work experience since they're older. Those two factors had a lot to do with the improvement in earnings and the improvement in employment. More highly educated people tend to seek jobs, tend to be more employed, and of course earn more money. A lot of the decline in low income among lone parents had to do with changing demography. That's the main message there.
Internationally, Canada's relative low-income rate stands in the middle of the pack. We're talking about relative low-income rates here, so it's relative to the median income of that country. When you measure it in that way, which is a standard way of doing it internationally, we have a lower low-income rate overall than do the United States and typically the U.K. quite frequently, but much higher that what we find in most western European countries, and certainly the Nordic countries. We're sort of in the middle of the pack.
As far as what's been happening to the decline among the elderly in low-income rate goes, as was mentioned earlier, that is truly a success story in Canada. Back in the 1970s we had one of the highest low-income rates among the elderly, and we now have one of the lowest internationally. That's an important dimension of that.
The third issue, which I've mentioned, is intergenerational transmission of earnings among poorer families. In the supplementary slides there is slide 13, if you wish to go to it. It asks what will happen to the sons of a father who is in the bottom one-quarter of the earnings distribution--that is part of the one-quarter of the population earning the least--when they become adults. Are they going to find themselves at the bottom of the earnings distribution as well?
What this study found was that about one-third of them will. Of all the sons of the fathers who are in the bottom of the earnings distribution, or the sons who are in poorer families, about one-third of them remain in poorer families when they grow up and start earning money themselves in their early thirties, but the rest move up.
There were two comments here. First, there is more mobility, more movement up the earnings distribution than we expected to see. Second, there is more mobility up the earnings distribution in Canada than we see in the United States or in the U.K. If you're born in a poorer family in Canada, you have a better chance of moving up than would someone in a similar situation in the U.S., for instance. We are sort of in the same ballpark in terms of intergenerational mobility as are the Nordic countries. They have a lot of mobility as well.
There are many mechanisms whereby people move up. One of them is education. A big difference between us and the Americans, for instance, is in terms of education and access to education. If a child grows up in a poorer family in Canada--that is, a family in the bottom one-quarter of the income distribution--the probability of them going to university or college is much higher in Canada than it is in the U.S. That may be part of the reason we see this intergenerational transmission. They're more likely to acquire education, which allows them to move up the income distribution.
At the higher levels, if you come from a richer family, you're more likely to go to university in the United States than you are in Canada. It's the opposite at the top. Since we're concerned with the bottom of the income distribution, that may be part of the story.
I'll leave it there.