Immigrant wages in the public and private sectors: how do these compare to the wages of the Canadian-born?

Canada has observed wage differences between comparable immigrants and the Canadian-born across the labour market. Using the cycles of Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey from 2006 to 2018, this thesis evaluates and decomposes the wage differences between immigrants and comparable Canadian-born workers both within and between the various levels of the public sector and the private sector. Progressing from the Ordinary Least Squares estimation method, the unconditional quantile regression method is combined with the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method to evaluate these differences at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th quantiles of the wage distribution. Within sectors, results show that the total immigrant wage gap is largest in the private sector, and the greater proportion of this gap is unexplained. Between sectors, the public-private sector wage gap is wider among the immigrant group, and most of these gaps are explained by the differences in the composition of workers in each sector.

Authors

• Ansah, Annabella
• University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science

• Wages -- Immigrants -- Canada
• Canada -- Emigration and immigration -- Economic aspects
• Wages -- Canada
• Income -- Canada -- Statistics
• Labor market -- Canada

Identifier

hdl:10133/5725

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:opus.uleth.ca:10133/5725