Lori Rennison was appointed Deputy Managing Director of the International Economic Analysis Department in March 2024. In this capacity, she contributes to the strategic direction and management of the department, whose activities include performing timely analysis of current and prospective global economic developments and policy experiences, focusing on their implications for Canada, and providing policy advice on global policy issues from the Canadian perspective. Since 2018, she has overseen the activities that support the Bank’s participation and influence in forums such as the G7, G20 and International Monetary Fund (IMF), working closely with the Governor and G7 Deputy Governor to advance the Bank’s international agenda. She led the creation of the G7 Central Bank Working Group on Digitalization during Canada’s 2018 G7 Presidency and served as its Chair over 2018-2024.
Ms. Rennison joined the Bank in 2007 from the Department of Finance, where she held leadership roles in economic and policy analysis. She was first based in the Bank’s Vancouver Office, where she took on the role of directing and managing the economic analysis activities of the Bank’s five regional offices. This work included overseeing and publishing the quarterly Business Outlook Survey and supporting the Bank’s communications strategy. After 2014, she took on senior policy advisor roles in the Canadian and International Economic Analysis Departments, leading their contributions to the Monetary Policy Report. She became a Senior Policy Director in 2017.
Similar to those of other forecasters, the Bank of Canada’s forecasts of global GDP growth have shown persistent negative errors over the past five years. This is in contrast to the pre-crisis period, when errors were consistently positive as global GDP surprised to the upside. All major regions have contributed to the forecast errors observed since 2011, although the United States has been the most persistent source of notable errors.
Forward guidance is one of the policy tools that a central bank can implement if it seeks to provide additional monetary stimulus when it is operating at the effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. It became more widely used during and after the global financial crisis.
At a time when the Bank is expecting a rotation of demand toward exports and investment, and transformative global trends are placing increasing emphasis on innovation, technology and organizational learning, an understanding of the competitiveness strategies of Canadian firms and the factors affecting them has become particularly relevant. This article summarizes findings from a Bank of Canada survey of 151 firms designed to extract signals on elements of firm strategy and organizational capital in order to help inform the macroeconomic outlook.
This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.
