Missing opportunities: Ontario’s urban prosperity gap Working Paper 3 - June 2003
Ontario’s city dwellers lag $5,779 in prosperity per person behind city dwellers in the peer group of leading US states. In contrast, Ontarians living outside city regions were $937 or 3% ahead of their US counterparts. This was a conclusion of Working Paper 3 released today by the Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity. The Working Paper demonstrates that Ontario’s cities benefit from some significant advantages in demographic and creativity indices, a steady inflow of well educated immigrants, a first rate primary and secondary school system, and a great mix of industry clusters. But Ontarians are missing opportunities to increase productivity and prosperity through lower aspirations, an inability to take full advantage of immigrants’ human capital, a federal fiscal framework that transfers resources out of urban regions, municipal fiscal and governance frameworks that need improvement, and the urban/rural imbalance of political representation federally and provincially.
