Kun Mo is the Director of the Commodities Division in the International Economics Analysis Department. He is focused on performing current analysis on commodity market developments and providing forecasts and risk assessments for commodity prices. Kun also previously worked on monitoring and forecasting Chinese and other emerging market economies. He obtained his Masters in Economics from the University of Toronto.
This note presents the annual update of Bank of Canada staff estimates for growth in global potential output. These estimates served as key inputs to the analysis supporting the April 2025 Monetary Policy Report.
Financial constraints deter firms from pursuing optimal investment plans. In China, we find privately owned firms face greater financial constraints than state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This can be explained by our finding that lenders appear less concerned about the credit risk of SOEs, which causes distortions in the allocation of credit.
The market for electric vehicles (EVs) is growing rapidly. Subsidies and technological improvements are expected to increase the market share of EVs over the coming decade. In its base-case scenario, the International Energy Agency (IEA) expects EV use to rise from 4 million vehicles in 2018 to 120 million by 2030, or from 0.3 per cent to over 7 per cent of the global car fleet.
Given that China accounts for about half of global copper consumption, it is reasonable to expect that any significant change in Chinese copper consumption will have an impact on the global market.
The size of China’s financial system raises the possibility that the liberalization of its capital account could have a large effect on the global financial system. This paper provides a counterfactual scenario analysis that estimates what the size and direction of China’s overseas portfolio investments would have been in 2015 if China had had no restrictions on these outflows.
Because commodity prices help determine Canada’s terms of trade, employment, income and, ultimately, inflation, it is important to understand what causes them to fluctuate. Since the early 1900s, there have been four commodity price supercycles—which we define as extended periods of boom and bust that can take decades to complete. Now in its downswing phase, the current supercycle started after growth in China and other emerging-market economies in the mid-1990s resulted in an unexpected demand shock. The extent of this downswing depends on numerous factors that are presently uncertain.
