E0 - General
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April 2017 Annual Reassessment of Potential Output Growth in Canada
This note summarizes the Bank of Canada’s annual reassessment of potential output growth, conducted for the April 2017 Monetary Policy Report. Potential output growth is projected to increase from 1.3 per cent in 2017 to 1.6 per cent by 2020. -
17 November 2016 Structural Reforms and Economic Growth in Emerging-Market Economies
Growth has slowed in many emerging-market economies (EMEs) since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, reflecting both cyclical and structural factors. In this context, it will be in-creasingly important for EMEs to raise potential growth by maintaining steady progress on structural reforms. How do structural reforms generally support growth? What are the re-form priorities for EMEs over recent history and today? Finally, what will be the impact of planned structural reforms on potential output growth among the world’s larger EMEs? These are some of the questions considered by the authors. -
Leaning Within a Flexible Inflation-Targeting Framework: Review of Costs and Benefits
This note examines the merits of monetary policy adjustments in response to financial stability concerns, taking into account changes in the state of knowledge since the renewal of the inflation-targeting agreement in 2011. A key financial system vulnerability in Canada is elevated household indebtedness: as more and more households are nearing their debt-capacity limits, the likelihood and severity of a large negative correction in housing markets are also increasing. -
Reconciling the Differences in Aggregate U.S. Wage Series
Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades. -
Credit Conditions and Consumption, House Prices and Debt: What Makes Canada Different?
There is widespread agreement that, in the United States, higher house prices raise consumption via collateral or possibly wealth effects. The presence of similar channels in Canada would have important implications for monetary policy transmission. -
On the Nexus of Monetary Policy and Financial Stability: Recent Developments and Research
Because financial and macroeconomic conditions are tightly interconnected, financial stability considerations are an important element of any monetary policy framework. Yet, the circumstances under which it would be appropriate for the Bank to use monetary policy to lean against financial risks need to be more fully specified (Côté 2014). -
Measuring Potential Output at the Bank of Canada: The Extended Multivariate Filter and the Integrated Framework
Estimating potential output and the output gap - the difference between actual output and its potential - is important for the proper conduct of monetary policy. However, the measurement and interpretation of potential output, and hence the output gap, is fraught with uncertainty, since it is unobservable. -
A Foreign Activity Measure for Predicting Canadian Exports
The author constructs a measure of foreign activity that takes into account the composition of foreign demand for Canadian exports. It has a number of interesting features. -
Trend Inflation, Wage and Price Rigidities, and Welfare
This paper studies the steady-state costs of inflation in a general-equilibrium model with real per capita output growth and staggered nominal price and wage contracts. -
Reactions of Canadian Interest Rates to Macroeconomic Announcements: Implications for Monetary Policy Transparency
In this study we statistically quantify the reactions of Canadian and U.S. interest rates to macroeconomic announcements released in Canada and in the United States. We find that Canadian interest rates react very little to Canadian macroeconomic news and are significantly affected by U.S. macroeconomic news, which indicates that international influences on the Canadian fixed-income markets are important.