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learn$ave Project: Final ReportProportion who saved the amountFigure 5.6 Proportion of Participants with Final Savings Lowerthan Peak Savings, by Peak Savings Amount, ProgramGroup Participants100%80%60%40%20%0%below$120Source:Note:$120 to$999.99$1,000 to$1,483.33Peak Savings AmountReachedmax*. aftermonth 18Participant Management Information System.Sample size: 2,388 program group participants.* Max. = $1,483.34 or greater in savings.Reachedmax*. bymonth 18education but no clear observable likelihood of greaterfinancial constraints. By looking at the total savings anddissaving activity, it appears that the “struggling” saversmay have been otherwise similar to the moderate saversbut used their learn$ave accounts almost as operatingaccounts, where money was nearly as likely to be depositedas it was to be withdrawn (for non-project purposes),suggesting they were in fact struggling with the intendedgoal of ever-increasing savings balances. The “moderate”savers were able to accumulate more and withdraw less,suggesting they were more oriented towards treating thelearn$ave account as a true savings account and less as anoperating account.The “early” savers were, as discussed earlier, the leastlikely to withdraw any funds from the account for purposesother than their intended learning goal. Given thatthese participants were largely newcomers to Canada,we strongly suspect that the special treatment of storedincome for recent immigrants at the participant selectionstage may have inadvertently countered any attempts toguard against transfers of existing lump-sum amountsinto the learn$ave account to benefit fully and quicklyfrom the financial incentive in the project. All EconomicClass immigrants to Canada are expected to arrive inthis country with stored income adequate to supportFigurethemselves5.6 ProportionandoftheirParticipantsdependantswith Finalfor oneSavingsyearLowerabove theapplicablethan PeakLow-incomeSavings, byCut-off.Peak SavingsUnderAmount,that policy regime,the lumpProgramsumGroupis clearlyParticipantsa stored reserve of income to bedrawn down during the first year of settlement in Canada.From one perspective, this could be assumed to haveencouraged windfall gains as newcomers with storedfinancial resources simply transferred money into theirlearn$ave account, moving quickly towards the goal ofadult education which they would likely have invested ineven in the absence of learn$ave. From another perspective,the project designers and immigrant participantsboth behaved consistently with an external immigrationpolicy that says financial resources brought into Canadaon landing are income and should be spent down onpurposes that help with settlement and adaptation. Theresponse of this sub-set of participants highlights veryclearly the problem of different approaches to decidingwhen an amount of money is a flow of income and whenit is a stock of assets. This is a much broader question forpolicy-makers that requires significantly more attentionthan can be offered in this report. In any case, becausethe study of learn$ave’s impact was based on randomassignment in which newcomers were roughly equallydistributed between the program and control groups, theassets brought in by newcomers to the country had no neteffect on the impact estimates of the project.Finally the “determined” savers are so labelled becausethey were able to meet the maximum savings goal butneeded more time than their “early” saving colleaguesto do so. They were also much less likely than their“modest” or “struggling” saving counterparts to make anywithdrawals from their learn$ave account for purposesoutside the project. Like the tortoise in the parable ofthe tortoise and the hare, they made it to the finish linehandily but at their own pace. This group, representinga little over a fifth of participants (21.9 per cent), maydemonstrate the behaviour most closely resembling thehoped-for results of the original design of the programsavings instrument. In the context of the learn$avesample of low-income adults, this suggests that flexibility(discouraging but not forbidding withdrawals) andpatience (allowing short as well as medium-term savingterms) may be important virtues in any savings vehicledesigned for vulnerable populations.Making matched withdrawalsIn this next section we move from examining whetherand how participants used their IDA accounts for buildingsavings to examining how participants used theiraccounts to withdraw (or use) matched credits for eligible54 | Chapter 5 Social Research and Demonstration Corporation