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Many emerging-market economies (EMEs) have significantly improved their macroeconomic fundamentals and undergone structural reforms since the Asian crisis. These developments have enhanced the composition of capital flows to EMEs through an improved debt structure, a larger share of capital flows as foreign direct investment, and greater access to international debt markets for corporations in EMEs. Structural changes in the global financial landscape have also increased capital flows, bringing economic and financial benefits to EMEs. During the recent financial crisis, however, the opening up of capital accounts and increased financial and trade linkages left many countries vulnerable to external disruptions. Countries with sound fundamentals have weathered the crisis relatively well. Policy-makers in EMEs need to implement policies that support capital flows and ensure that controls imposed to deal with detrimental outflows during periods of stress or rapid inflows are only temporary.

The ability to conduct financial transactions using bank notes is crucial to independent living. Yet this can pose significant challenges for individuals who are blind or partially sighted. This article discusses the Bank of Canada's efforts over the past 30 years to meet the accessibility needs of a specific subset of the population–Canadians living with blindness or vision loss. It also reports the findings of expert and user assessments of the suite of accessibility features on the current series of bank notes and shares plans for the next series.

In response to the financial crisis of 2007-09, the Bank of Canada intervened repeatedly to stabilize the financial system and limit the repercussions of the crisis on the Canadian economy. This article reviews the extraordinary liquidity measures taken by the Bank during this period and the principles that guided the Bank's interventions. A preliminary assessment of the term liquidity facilities provided by the Bank suggests that they were an important source of liquidity support for some financial institutions and, on a broader basis, served to reduce uncertainty among market participants about the availability of liquidity, as well as helping to promote a return to well-functioning money markets.

Recent evidence finds a positive association between the prevalence of loans of inferior quality and the growth in securitized products. Some attribute this development to the lack of incentives for originators to screen and monitor the performance of securitized loans; others stress that certain factors, such as balance-sheet management, also contributed to the problem, making it difficult to pin down the reason for the proliferation of such loans during the period of high securitization growth. The author reviews the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process that contributed to the ongoing financial turmoil and highlights the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.

This article examines the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high. Focusing on the five-year period (2002-07) that preceded the financial crisis, it examines the choices made by financial institutions among the assets that are pledged as collateral in Canada's Large Value Transfer System. This serves as a baseline for collateral-management practices during relatively normal times. The results of this study are important for policy-makers, especially the Bank of Canada, which is concerned both about the efficient functioning of fixed-income markets and about the credit risk it ultimately bears in insuring LVTS settlement. The results suggest that relative market liquidity and market-making capacity are important factors in the choice of securities pledged as collateral in the LVTS.

The number of job gains and losses across firms in Canada each year is roughly one-fifth the total number of jobs and generally occurs within sectors (industries) rather than across sectors. Since labour reallocation within sectors has been strongly related to productivity growth in Canada, defining the key drivers of this type of reallocation is important, given the higher rates of reallocation and productivity growth in the Untied States than in Canada. This article finds that the appreciation of the Canadian dollar and rising commodity prices led to above-average reallocation of labour across sectors over the 2005-08 period, but that the impact on productivity has been minor. Labour reallocation across firms, however, generates substantial labour productivity gains in manufacturing and the business sector as a whole.

BoC-GEM, an adaptation of the Global Economy Model, initially developed at the International Monetary Fund and the New York Federal Reserve, is a very useful tool to tackle a broad range of issues pertinent to the current economic context, such as the recent movements in commodity prices and the adjustment of global imbalances. This article describes the structure and functioning of BoC-GEM and details some examples of recent application in the areas of monetary policy and issues in the real economy and questions of financial stability and describes ongoing research into introducing a financial sector into the model.

In 2006, the Bank initiated a research program exploring two alternatives to the current inflation-targeting framework: (i) lowering the inflation target and (ii) shifting to a price-level target. This article discusses progress to date, places the Bank's findings in the context of a broader literature, and identifies avenues for future research.