Did the ‘Quiet Revolution’ Really Change Anything?

Abstract

The year 1960 is often presented as a break year in the economic history of Quebec and Canada. It is used to mark the beginning of the “Quiet Revolution” during which Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec under rapid socio-economic change in the form of rapid economic convergence with the rest of Canada and the emergence of a more expansive state. Using synthetic control methods, we analyze whether 1960 is associated with a departure from previous developments. With regards to GDP per capita, GDP per worker, household-size adjusted income, life expectancy at birth, and enrollment rates in primary and secondary schools, we find that 1960 was not an important date. For most of these measures, the counterfactual scenario is slightly better than the actual data but not by significant margins. Only with respect to the size of government do we find sign of a break.

Can geography explain Quebec's historical poverty?

“…34 We find that cultural diversity is correlated with wage dispersion is both Tables, but only weakly so in Table 3. Cultural diversity being often a byproduct of trade (Geloso & Rouanet, 2020), it is not surprising that more integrated markets also spurred a cultural melting-pot. 35 The French-Canadian share of the population is also weakly (but positively) correlated with both nominal wage dispersion and grain wage dispersion.…”

“…It is fair to say that Quebec and Ontario had roughly the same geographical differences with Latin America as rich New England had with Latin America. Second, Quebec has consistently lagged behind Ontario and the United States since that time (the gap expanded up to the 1940s and has narrowed since then) (Dean & Geloso, 2022; Gagnon et al, 2023; Geloso, 2017; Geloso et al, 2022; Migué, 1998; Paquet, 1999; Raynauld, 1961). Third, the claim that geography explains Quebec's relative poverty is a recurrent theme among economic historians.…”