Last updated on April 6, 2011
Few people outside of Canada have ever heard of Nunavut. The most recent political entity among Canada’s 13 provinces and territories, Nunavut came into being on April 1, 1999 after Parliament voted in 1993 to establish a new territory out of the Eastern half of the Northwest Territories.
Few people — few Canadians, even — know that the people of Nunavut face socioeconomic conditions that are closer to those faced by the average sub-Saharan African than by the average Canadian. In 2009, there were over 3,000 violent crimes committed in Nunavut, whose population barely exceeded 32,000. A third of Nunavut’s population is under 15 years of age, and the territory faces a high secondary-school dropout rate as well as a high rate of unemployment. To make things worse, life expectancy in Nunavut is ten years lower than elsewhere in Canada.
Most of the information in the paragraph above can be gleaned from an excellent series of articles, infographics, and videos put together titled “The Trials of Nunavut” in The Globe and Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a number of problems, but at least those problems are being studied, and many of those problems could be solved with the right mix of good economic policies and political will. Nunavut, however, has little to no natural resources. It is also so remote as to prevent it from participating in most markets and to make the cost of living exceedingly high for an already impoverished population; a roundtrip from New York City to Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital, would cost over $2,500 if scheduled for the second half of May. Perhaps more importantly, agriculture — sub-Saharan Africa’s comparative advantage — is out of the question in Nunavut, with the end result being that Nunavut has no obvious comparative advantage.
Every cloud has a silver lining, however. If I were to start grad school in the near future, or if I were looking for a dissertation topic, I would plan on doing fieldwork in Nunavut. As far as I know, no serious development researcher has studied Nunavut, and the economic development of the territory constitutes a great opportunity to help as well as a great opportunity for highly original research. I thus encourage budding researchers to seriously think about studying what is perhaps development’s final frontier.