Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank you, Mr. Arora, for your presentation. I want to thank your team for coming on such short notice. I want to thank you and your team for the important contribution and role that you play in our country, particularly right now, when we really need our data.
Because we're just starting this very important study on inflation, I want to provide some context about where we are right now. I'm going to quote a little bit of what I read in the Globe just two weekends ago. It was quoting Professor Adam Tooze from Columbia University, who wrote a book called Shutdown. He said that the first half of 2020 was historic. He said that 95% of the world's economies suffered a simultaneous contraction. That had never happened before. Three billion adults were furloughed from their jobs, or tried to work from home. That hadn't happened either. More than a billion and a half young people had their schooling interrupted. That's still happening. The sum of lost earnings, just in the first months of the pandemic, was $10 trillion U.S., more than a 10th of the global GDP.
However, in Canada, and in many places in the world, the economy has come back. Unemployment is now at around 5.9% versus 13%, which was at the start of the pandemic. GDP is back to where it was. The S&P 500 index is twice as high as it was in March 2020. Household wealth in Canada has risen by a full quarter above prepandemic levels. The average Canadian household added $5,000 to its savings account. The economy's recovering in many ways, much quicker than we thought.
I think the other point that's really important to make is that, in the U.S., only a small portion of its emergency dollars has actually gone to households. Professor Tooze has actually lauded Canada. He said our more generous payouts to the middle class have been an “underrated innovation in the history of the welfare state.”
My first question to you, Mr. Arora, is the following. There's a narrative that the ultrarich are seeing their wealth grow and all other Canadians are facing increased hardship following the pandemic. In your year-end update, you noted lower-wealth households and young families have seen disproportionately large increases in their income and wealth. Can you tell us more about this?