Search

Canada’s inflation-control targets establish a specific medium-term objective for monetary policy.

Since the May Report, the international economic environment has continued to improve. Economic activity abroad grew faster than expected, while inflation in the major economies remained subdued.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

Since the last Report, the Canadian economy has advanced broadly in line with expectations.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to major global developments.

During the past six months, global economic uncertainties have intensified, largely as a result of developments in emerging-market economies.

We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty.

The Canadian economy continues to operate just above its full production capacity, and the near-term outlook for core inflation has moved slightly higher.

Growth in the Canadian economy has been essentially in line with the expectations set out in the Bank’s January Monetary Policy Report Update.

Over the past year, Canada’s economy has outperformed the economies of virtually all the other major industrial countries.