Thursday, April 26, 2018

Job Vacancy Rates

Question:A faculty member is looking for job vacancy rates from 2001 to 2017 for nursing care facilities, community care facilities for the elderly, and home health care facilities based on their respective NAICS codes. The closest CANSIM table I have come across is 285-0002, but it doesn’t go earlier than 2015. Is it possible to get access to quarterly data from this table earlier than 2015 and perhaps at a more detailed NAICS level? 

Answer: 
The Job Vacancy Rate (JVR) survey only began in early 2015. There wasn’t any JVR prior to this data.

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS) database

Question:
I just received the following request and was wondering if anyone knew if there is free access to this database.
“My students need to access data from the National Ambulatory Care Reporting System (NACRS) database that is maintained by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.”



Answer: 
Some NACRS reports are available for free at https://apps.cihi.ca/mstrapp/asp/Main.aspx. I believe some of them can be customized a bit via the web app.

Otherwise, grad students can request access via the special grad student data access program - unsure if there's an equivalent program for staff/faculty-level researchers. I was told in an earlier request that more detailed, customized data requests would have to go through data request program at https://www.cihi.ca/en/access-data-and-reports/make-a-data-request (cost-recovery).

Monday, April 16, 2018

Canadian university tuition fees for international students

Question:
I'm now doing a project analyzing Canadian university tuition fees for international students, I already got some data from CANSIM Table 477-0023 and 477-0024 while I`m still not able to retrieve data in year 2000 & 2005. Just wondering, if possible, could you please guide me to find those missing data? (To be more specific, I need data for these two years describing weighted average tuition fees for international students, by province, and including undergraduate & graduate levels separately).

Answer 1:
You might want to try the CAUT almanacs:

https://www.caut.ca/latest/publications/almanac

They do have provincial averages for both undergraduate and graduate students, though I haven’t checked all of the years.

Unfortunately, though, the online statistics begin at 2002 (although they may have earlier years in the 2002 edition).

Answer 2:
Table 9 in TLAC includes weighted average tuition fees for full-time undergrad and grad students, domestic and international, from 1972 forward.

Answer from Subject Matter:
There are two templates of products that have weighted average tuition. Each file is $150, or $350 total. I think they should have all the information that the client wants. Please let me know if the client is interested and I will send you the catalogue number and the actual products.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

"Welfare" Expenditures -- Public Accounts?

Question:
A researcher is interested in learning more about confirmed “welfare” expenditures in Canada, however it might be defined/normalized by StatCan.

We have located CANSIM 380-0079 (Current and capital accounts - General governments) as a means to get some numbers. This is looking at government transfers. The idea of using 380-0079 is based loosely on the context offered in the User Guide: Canadian System of Macroeconomic Accounts, where 380-0079’s row labelled “Less: Transfers paid to households” equates to “Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplement, welfare, etcetera.” (n.b. text is listed directly from the user guide). My hunch, though, is that this might exclude the operating costs for social programs themselves.

I don’t know gov’t finances in CANSIM like others. Is there a better way to look at this issue? Another table or product to consider? E.g, is there a consolidated “Public Accounts of Canada + Provinces”? At the least, I’d like to get some certainty on what these values – transfers to households – mean in the table. E.g., do they just reflect gov’t spending to the HH for such social programs? Getting the fuller picture (spend to HH and operating costs) in tabular format would be amazing if at all possible, too.

Answer:
CANSIM Table 380-0081 is the table that the client can use to extract the “welfare” estimates that we have available. In that table the variable is called Income Maintenance.

The estimates found in this series are strictly the amounts transferred from governments to qualifying households, and do not include amounts related to the administration of these programs. Public Sector Statistics Division does publish a functional breakdown of government expenditures, but our understanding is that it is only available at a high level of aggregation.