Inégalités de niveau de vie en Nouvelle-Calédonie, l’impact du nickel : mesure et décomposition

Abstract

With 9% of the world's nickel reserves, New Caledonia is by nature a land of nickel. Fundamental to the Caledonian labor market, nickel will account for 20% of the market wealth created in the territory in 2019. In this article, we seek to identify how mining activity structures the territory by looking at living standards measured on the basis of household housing and equipment characteristics. Based on living standards inequalities measured in 2009 and 2014 for different geographical areas, we show unambiguously the improvement and convergence of Caledonian living standards in this interval. Finally, the decomposition of living standards inequalities à la Shapley reveals a reduction in the contribution of mining activity to inequalities, which would tend to prove that the wealth produced by this activity is increasingly diffusing to the Caledonian economy as a whole.

Keywords

• inequality
• standard of living
• mine
• nickel