Who Among the Unemployed Receives Employment Insurance Benefits?
Analysis of the aggregate EICS data for 1997 suggests that the Employment Insurance program is meeting its objective of providing temporary income support to workers in Canada between jobs. Most unemployed for whom the program has been designed are indeed eligible for benefits. Figure 4.1 and Table 4.1 help illustrate how this is the case. Figure 4.1 entitled “From Unemployment to the B/U Ratio” decomposes the aggregate unemployment figure. Table 4.1 highlights important statistics from Figure 4.1. Dividing the number in the lowest rectangle (all regular EI beneficiaries) of Figure 4.1 by the number in the top rectangle (all unemployed), one gets the familiar 42 percent B/U ratio for 1997. The rectangles in the middle show the various categories of labour market participants one has to subtract or add to go from the total number of unemployed (the U of the B/U ratio) to the total number of regular EI beneficiaries (the B of the B/U ratio). One first observation is that, about 78 percen
