86
billion can be directly attributed to an increase in educational attainment for Aboriginal
Canadians. Table 24a also summarizes the potential cumulative impact of increases in
educational attainment under different assumptions. In the case of a partial catch-up, the estimate
ranges from a lower-bound of $31.2 billion to an upper-bound of $36.5 billion. If the complete
educational gap is closed by 2017, these effects are twice as large, $62.3 billion and $71.1 billion
respectively.
Chart 18: Difference Between Canadian GDP in Scenario 10 and Canadian
GDP in Base Scenario 1, 2001-2017
E. The Case of the North American Indian Population
North American Indians constitute the majority of the Aboriginal population in Canada
and so they are of particular interest to Canadian policy-makers. Also, this group is the one who
mostly lives on reserve, and it has been shown that economic conditions are worst among the
fraction of the Aboriginal population who live on reserves. In this sub-section, the methodology
explained previously is applied to this particular group of the Aboriginal population.
Table 25 shows the main results of this analysis. Due to their high representation among
the Aboriginal population, increasing the educational attainment of North American Indians
alone has similar implications than doing it for the entire Aboriginal population.
which can be called the growth rate effect. Each year, the growth rate is 0.081 percentage point. Therefore, there is a
small compound growth rate effect which magnifies the difference of the absolute annual growth of GDP of the two
scenarios. Overall, both effects add up, which means that past increases in the level of the GDP carry on to
subsequent years and that each year an additional increase is added to the total. For example, the increase of around
$1 billion in 2002 is repeated in every year until 2017.