Product Market

Definitions

Output gap (Bank of Canada's conventional measure)

The output gap is the difference between the economy's actual output and the level of production it can achieve with existing labour, capital, and technology without putting sustained upward pressure on inflation. Learn more

Capacity utilization rates

The rates of capacity use are measures of the intensity with which industries use their production capacity. Capacity use is the percentage of actual to potential output. Learn more

Unfilled orders/shipments - Manufacturing excluding aerospace products and parts: Proportion of unfilled orders to shipments.

Unfilled orders represent a backlog or stock of orders that will generate future shipments assuming that they are not cancelled. Unfilled orders are calculated on a Canada-wide basis, not by province.

Shipments are defined as the value of goods manufactured by establishments that have been shipped to a customer. Shipments exclude any wholesaling activity, and any revenues from the rental of equipment or the sale of electricity. Note that, in practice, some respondents report financial transactions rather than payments for work done. Learn more

Aggregate stock-to-sales ratio

Ratio of stocks to final sales of goods, both expressed in current dollars.
Unpublished data.
National Income and Expenditure Accounts Division, Statistics Canada

The foreign activity measure

"The foreign activity measure captures the composition of foreign demand for Canadian exports by including components of U.S. private final domestic demand and economic activity in Canada’s other trading partners. The Bank of Canada uses it to predict demand for Canada’s exports.”

Additional details:

It is updated four times a year, concurrently with the publication of the Monetary Policy Report.

A complete description of the foreign activity measure can be found in discussion paper 2012-1, “A Foreign Activity Measure for Predicting Canadian Exports.”