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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently adopted the "2007 Decision on Bilateral Surveillance Over Members' Policies," a landmark reform that modernizes the general principles of IMF surveillance. However, support for the reform was not unanimous, and doubts have been expressed about how the Decision would be applied in practice. The authors assess the first year […]

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 […]

The authors explore the usefulness of macroeconomic models in analyzing global economic developments by examining movements in commodity prices between July 2007 and July 2008. They use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model and investigate the longer-term outlook for commodity prices by constructing two different, globally consistent, scenarios for emerging Asia.

Real rigidities that limit the responsiveness of real marginal cost to output are a key ingredient of sticky price models necessary to account for the dynamics of output and inflation. We argue here, in the spirit of Bils and Kahn (2000), that the behavior of marginal cost over the cycle is directly related to that of inventories, data on which is readily available.

This paper studies the impact of market timing on Canadian firms' capital structure and makes a comparison with U.S. firms.

After 10 years of impressive growth, India is now the fourth largest economy in the world. Yet, to date, India's impact on global commodity markets has been muted. The authors examine how India's domestic and trade policies have distorted and constrained its demand for commodities.