Low Income Cut-Offs (LICOs)
Definition
LICOs are a set of income thresholds estimated by Statistics Canada to help identify Canadians who are likely to be substantially worse off than the average. Statistics Canada uses LICOs and other low income measures to generate various low income indices or statistics. These statistics help researchers to study the characteristics of relatively worse-off families in Canada and to report important trends and changing compositions of low income families and individuals (Fellegi, 1997). Because being worse off than the average does not necessarily mean that one is poor, Statistics Canada emphasizes that the LICOs are not a poverty line. Nevertheless, many researchers and practitioners often treat them as Canada’s de facto poverty line.
Description
Besides the LICOs, Statistics Canada also produces the Low Income Measures (LIMs) and the Market Basket Measure(MBM) as alternative low income lines. LICOs are the oldest of the three. The first set of LICO thresholds was...
References
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