Integration of wealth, income, consumption and saving

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Efforts continue toenhance data quality and further integrate wealth with the estimates of income, consumption and saving in the DHEA. As an initial step, the inclusion of the elderly institutionalized population establishes consistency between the population concepts used for both DHEA wealth and DHEA income. As a result, direct comparisons can be made on an average dollars per household basis for wealth indicators that are based on disposable income, including real estate, net worth and debt expressed as a share of disposable income. However, the underlying micro-data used to estimate distributions for these indicators are not integrated. Current DHEA estimates for the distributions of wealth related to income are therefore not necessarily consistent with DHEA estimates of disposable income, which use data from other sources, such as the Social Policy Simulation Database and Model.

Future efforts to extend and harmonize the data sources used to produce DHEA estimates of wealth, income, consumption and saving, including the identification of greater detail on provincial and territorial assets and liabilities from third-party sources, as well as on income from CRA tax files, will allow greater consistency of estimates across all MEA data sources. Over the longer term, these efforts will enable a better understanding of how household resources are distributed over time, across regions and between subgroups of the population in Canada, compiled in a framework consistent with the Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts.