Mr. Poloz was appointed Governor of the Bank of Canada, effective 3 June 2013, for a term of seven years. As Governor, he is also Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank.
Born in Oshawa, Ontario, Mr. Poloz graduated from Queen’s University in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in economics. He received a master’s degree in economics in 1979 and a PhD in economics in 1982, both from the University of Western Ontario.
Mr. Poloz has over 30 years of public and private sector experience in financial markets, forecasting and economic policy. He first joined the Bank of Canada in 1981, and occupied a range of increasingly senior positions over a 14-year span, culminating in his appointment as Chief of the Bank’s Research Department in 1992. After his departure from the Bank in 1995, he spent four years at BCA Research, where he served as managing editor of its flagship publication, The International Bank Credit Analyst.
Mr. Poloz joined Export Development Canada (EDC) in 1999 as Vice-President and Chief Economist, and in 2004 was promoted to Senior Vice-President, Corporate Affairs and Chief Economist, with added responsibility for Corporate Planning, Communications, Government and International Relations, Engineering, Corporate Social Responsibility, and Corporate Research. From 2008 to 2010, he was Senior Vice-President, Financing, with responsibility for all of EDC’s lending programs, in addition to the Economics and Corporate and International Trade Intelligence groups. In January 2011, he was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer of EDC, a position in which he served until his appointment as Governor of the Bank of Canada.
Mr. Poloz is a Certified International Trade Professional and a graduate of Columbia University’s Senior Executive Program. He has been a visiting scholar at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., and at the Economic Planning Agency in Tokyo, Japan. Mr. Poloz has taught economics at the University of Western Ontario, Concordia University and Queen’s School of Business. He is a past president of the Ottawa Economics Association.
Mr. Poloz resides in Ottawa with his wife of 36 years, Valerie. He has two children, Jessica and Nicholas, and he is a grandfather.
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen S. Poloz discusses the structural damage to the Canadian economy caused by the crisis, and the need to rebuild Canada’s economic capacity and strengthen business confidence.
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen S. Poloz discusses the current economic context and how that is influencing the Bank’s work of delivering confidence.
This paper attempts to provide one interpretation of the broad regional economic history of Canada since the early 1970s. As the title of the paper suggests, we believe that, to a significant degree, regional diversity in economic performance reflects movements in Canada's terms of trade, which very frequently are tied to developments in world commodity markets.
: Regional economic developmentsText of major 1995 lecture by Bank Governor Gordon Thiessen, plus articles from Bank of Canada Review and other sources
: Transmission of monetary policyThis article provides an overview of the Bank of Canada's new economic model, the Quarterly Projection Model (QPM), which has been under development at the Bank since 1989.
The model has two roles. It is used to make economic projections, which are conducted quarterly and form an important basis for discussions of monetary policy between staff and senior management. QPM is also a research tool: it was developed to analyse important changes to the economy or macroeconomic policies which require a deeper understanding of long-term economic forces.
The model pays particular attention to factors shaping long-term equilibrium, such as stocks of wealth, capital, government debt and net foreign assets. Various sources of dynamics, including the adjustment of forward-looking expectations, operate to determine the transition path to equilibrium and the consistency of expectations.
The article discusses the history of QPM and earlier economic models at the Bank, and provides a simple overview of how the model works.
: Economic modelsThis paper reviews various competing theories of structural unemployment and considers whether they may be used to explain any of the rise in unemployment experienced by Canada during the most recent economic cycle.
: Labour marketsThis paper assesses evidence, from the G-7 countries, of a link between a country's fiscal policy and its external balance, often referred to as the "twin deficits" phenomenon. It begins by reviewing the stylized facts, and then examines the theoretical case for such a link.
: Balance of payments and components; Fiscal Policy; International topicsThis paper replicates and extends the econometric work of two previous studies of output-inflation dynamics in Canada -- Fortin (1991) and Cozier and Wilkinson (1991) -- in an attempt to reconcile their divergent conclusions.
In this study the authors compare the information content of alternative monetary aggregates with respect to total spending in the economy, using data for Canada. The analysis considers 46 monetary measures, about half of which constitute conventional summation aggregates, while the remainder are superlative indices of monetary services based on the Fisher Ideal formula. The [...]
: Monetary aggregatesIn this paper, the simulation properties of a small, dynamic, open-economy IS-LM-Aggregate Supply model are examined under a variety of alternative policy rule assumptions. These assumptions include rigid money stock, exchange rate and nominal income targets, as well as less rigid policy rules that recognize information limitations. The model that is used consists of four [...]
: Economic models; Monetary policy frameworkAn econometric model of the portfolio behaviour of the Canadian household sector is developed to study the linkages between demands for financial assets. The theoretical basis for the model is a version of the well-known Brainard-Tobin framework, which is extended to integrate the consumption-savings and portfolio-allocation decisions. This integration allows joint estimation of the real [...]
: Economic models; Monetary policy framework
