Calista Cheung is Director of the Survey and Economic Intelligence Division in the Canadian Economic Analysis (CEA) Department. In this capacity, she oversees the economic analysis, research, and outreach activities of the Bank’s five regional offices. She leads the division in executing and publishing the Bank’s Business Outlook Survey, Business Leaders’ Pulse, and the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations, and supports the Bank’s communication strategy.
Prior to this role, Ms. Cheung managed the economic research team at the Reserve Bank of New Zealand from 2024 to 2025. She first joined the Bank of Canada in 2003 as an economist in CEA before moving to the International Economic Analysis Department as a senior economist. She worked at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as an economist and then senior economist from 2009 to 2014, and then returned to the Bank to serve as Regional Director (Economics) for British Columbia and the Yukon until 2024. Ms. Cheung has also worked at the European Central Bank in a secondment, and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston as a research intern.
Ms. Cheung has a Master’s degree in Economics from Boston University and a Bachelor of Commerce with Joint Honours in Economics and Finance from McGill University.
We construct an index that systematically measures and tracks the stringency of government policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic across Canadian provinces. Researchers can use this stringency index to analyze how the pandemic is affecting the economy.
This note reviews the channels through which scheduled minimum wage increases over the coming years may affect Canadian economic activity and inflation and assesses their macroeconomic impacts. From reduced-form estimates of direct minimum wage pass-through, we find that consumer price index (CPI) inflation could be boosted by about 0.1 percentage point (pp) on average in 2018.
What sources of financing do Indigenous-owned businesses in Canada use, and what are their expectations about prices, wages and inflation? We find Indigenous-owned firms are significantly less reliant on financial institutions as sources of financing compared with non-Indigenous firms. We also find Indigenous-owned firms have higher inflation expectations and weaker wage-growth expectations.
Several measures suggest economic outcomes have improved for Indigenous Peoples in recent decades. Yet, institutional settings and gaps in infrastructure and financing continue to hinder their economic progress. Recent efforts have helped address some data gaps, and new institutions are helping Indigenous communities to overcome historic barriers to growth.
This paper estimates a three‐frequency dynamic factor model for nowcasting Canadian provincial gross domestic product (GDP). Canadian provincial GDP is released by Statistics Canada on an annual basis only, with a significant lag (11 months).
Housing starts and building permits data are commonly used as leading indicators of economic activity. In British Columbia, all new homes must be registered with the Homeowner Protection Office, a branch of BC Housing, before the issuance of building permits and the start of construction.
This paper discusses broad trends in labour force participation and part-time employment across different age groups since the Great Recession and uses provincial data to identify changes related to population aging, cyclical effects and other factors.
Commodity prices have increased dramatically and persistently over the past several years, followed by a sharp reversal in recent months. These large and persistent movements in commodity prices raise questions about their implications for global inflation. The process of globalization has motivated much debate over whether global factors have become more important in driving the […]
Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for oil and many base metals over this period.
This paper evaluates the performance of static and dynamic factor models for forecasting Canadian real output growth and core inflation on a quarterly basis. We extract the common component from a large number of macroeconomic indicators, and use the estimates to compute out-of-sample forecasts under a recursive and a rolling scheme with different window sizes.
Offshoring has become an increasingly prominent aspect of the globalization process. Evidence over the past two decades suggests that offshoring has not exerted a noticeable impact on overall employment and earnings growth in advanced economies, but it has likely contributed to shifting the demand for labour towards higher-skilled jobs. There appear to be some positive effects of offshoring on productivity, but such effects differ by country.
