published in: P. Bevelander and D. DeVoretz (eds.), The Economics of Citizenship, IMER Press, Malmo Sweden, 2008
This paper consists of two parts focusing on the immigrant’s decision to acquire Canadian citizenship, and her subsequent performance as a taxpayer and recipient of public finance transfers. Our results support the view that selectivity bias appears in Canadian immigrant citizenship decisions and varies by immigrant gender and source country groups. Our Oaxaca decomposition results demonstrated the importance of the human capital endowment in explaining selectivity corrected citizenship-non-citizenship earnings differences. Next, we confirmed the standard results that the naturalization decision is conditioned by the expected wage gain, level of education, marital status, age and presence of children. At the macro level, our study focused on the implications of Canadian citizenship for the lifetime public finance contributions by naturalized immigrants. All immigrants, regardless of their source country group and citizenship status, made a positive contribution to Canada’s treasury circa 1996 over their life cycle. Naturalized citizens from OECD countries contributed the largest public finance transfers exceeding the corresponding value for the Canadian-born by more than $14,000. In addition, naturalized citizens made higher net contributions than their non-citizen counterparts regardless of source country. The relatively poor public finance performance of non-citizens was explained by their lifetime low income and low tax payments.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.