Patterns of Inequality in North America
Read this short text which explains the geographic variation of income inequality in Canada and the United States. Finlayson recognizes the roles race, ethnicity, and historical development play in the spatial pattern of poverty and income inequality.
For example, she observes the southern United States has a higher percentage of people in poverty than in other parts of the country. Similarly, in Canada, provinces with high percentages of indigenous people have high-income inequality. Spatial patterns of income inequality are also apparent at the local level.
Why does income inequality vary geographically? Why do clusters of census divisions with similar levels of poverty and wealth exist? Income determines where people can afford to live. Where people live determines where their children attend school, the goods and services they can access, where they go for entertainment and recreation, their job prospects, and many other factors that shape their lives.
Your address can limit or expand your options. Aging, housing options, stagnant wages, and higher costs can make the situation worse. Globalization has exacerbated income inequality as more people make less and fewer people make more.
While both Canada and the United States have relatively strong economies, income inequality persists. In the United States in particular, around 12 percent of people live below the poverty line. Some argue, however, that the traditional definition of "living below the poverty line" has not kept up with rising living costs and inflation and that the actual percentage of Americans living in or near poverty is far higher. This income inequality is geographical, with the states in the south having significantly greater concentrations of people in poverty that the rest of the country (see Figure 4.13). These regional differences are connected to historical differences in development. Just as the northern areas were the first to industrialize, they were the first areas to transition to more higher-income service industries. Although areas like Silicon Valley in California and the Austin-San Antonio region of Texas have had an influx of high-tech industries, some areas of the south have been slow to transition from primarily agricultural and natural resource based economies.
Figure 4.13: Map of Poverty in the United States, 2015 (United States Census Bureau, U.S. Department of Commerce, Public Domain)
Canada's poverty rate is lower than the United States at around 10 percent. In general, Canada has stronger social welfare programs than the US. All provinces of Canada provide universal, publicly funded healthcare, for example, and a monthly income is provided to those in extreme poverty.
However, in both the United States and Canada, income inequality is closely tied to ethnicity and race. For Canada's First Nations, however, poverty and homelessness rates are much higher than the national average. Half of all indigenous children in Canada live in poverty. In some areas, like Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the number is over 60 percent. In the US, the poverty rate among non-Hispanic whites was just over 10 percent in 2014. For black Americans, the poverty rate was 26 percent. By some measures, the US has the highest degree of income inequality among the advanced economies of the world. In Canada, the richest 10 percent own 57.4 percent of the country's wealth. In the United States, the richest 10 percent own over 75 percent of the wealth in the country, the highest of the twenty most developed countries in the world.
Source: Caitlin Finlayson, https://worldgeo.pressbooks.com/chapter/north-america/#chapter-163-section-5ion-4rica/#chapter-163-section-3
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