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Articles

Vol. 16 No. 1 (2024): The Marshall Decisions and New Brunswick Twenty-Five Years Later.

The Marshall Decisions and Economic Well-Being Indicators in Atlantic Canadian Communities

Submitted
August 31, 2024
Published
2024-09-13

Abstract

This article estimates the economic impact of the Marshall decisions on First Nations communities with higher-than-average proportions of their labour force engaged in trapping and fishing. Using the 1996 and 2016 waves of the Canadian census, we construct four commonly used indicators of economic well-being (education, income, unemployment, housing); impacts are examined using a difference-in-differences method that controls for heterogeneous effects. Results are mixed. Although the evidence does not necessarily support an unquestionable conclusion of direct economic improvement, our reduced-form results characterize a series of trends in these communities, emphasizing the importance of multidimensional measures of economic well-being.