Exclusion of people with disabilities from paid work is widely documented in the literature, but has not been quantified in monetary terms. In Canada it is estimated that 795,000 people with disabilities are unemployed despite being able and willing to work. Many different barriers prevent these people from working, including discrimination and bias, employers’ concerns about cost and productivity, and a lack of knowledge on how to appropriately accommodate different abilities. Not counted are the underemployed—individuals with skill levels higher than their job demands who are unable to secure appropriate work due to their disability. This study will first develop a conceptual framework and methods for costing the exclusion of people with disabilities and then apply it to the Canadian context. It will draw on the cost of illness/ economic burden methodology, and extend it into the sociological domain based on concepts of the disablement process. The question driving the review is: What is the cost to Canadians of excluding people with disability from fully participation in society?
•To develop a counterfactual framework of a more inclusive society for application in Canada context.
•To synthesize theoretical and methodological literature on a more inclusive counterfactual scenario.
•To develop a grounded counterfactual scenario for application in a cost of exclusion study based on the literature synthesis and to identify measures available to operationalize the counterfactual scenario.
•To estimate the magnitude of key components of exclusion, e.g., labour-market output/ productivity costs, exclusion from social role engagement, expenses for support provision by social programs.
•To identify the distribution of costs of exclusion across stakeholders—people with disabilities and their families, employers, the public sector, and society at large.
This study is of relevance to injured worker and disability communities, employers, policymakers, disability program administrators, and service providers. The methodology to be developed for this study will be of interest to international stakeholders in work disability arena, including the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization.