Inequality is a major theme of current research in economics throughout the world. The now famous Capital by Thomas Piketty released in English in 2014 is a case in point. It is also a major focal point in Canada, as illustrated by the book Income Inequality: The Canadian Story, published recently by the Institute for Research on Public Policy and in the ongoing work of the Broadbent Institute and other groups.
There’s another aspect of income inequality related to inter-temporal considerations — that is, an aspect of inequality through time.
One area of interest in this field is whether it costs more to purchase an average residential property now than it did in the past. In other words, are residential properties becoming less affordable over time, and, as a result less accessible or plausible for those with lower or median.
Obviously, the nominal dollar cost of a house or a condo today is much higher than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Indeed, it is even higher than what it was just a couple of years ago. There exists a number of indices that look at the price of housing by deflating the nominal dollar price of a house by the consumer price index (CPI) to get an idea of how fast housing prices are rising relative to the general rise in prices of consumer goods.
‘Cost of home today is double the amount in weeks of labour time compared to 1970s’ is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
