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Six months ago, at the time of the last Monetary Policy Report, the global economic and financial environment was volatile and highly uncertain because of the adverse situation in Asia and the fallout from the Russian debt moratorium.

In our analysis of the US productivity slowdown in the 1970s and 2000s, we find that a significant portion of this deceleration can be attributed to a lack of improvement in allocative efficiency across sectors. Our analysis further identifies increased sector-level volatility as a major contributor to this lack of improvement in allocative efficiency.

The year that just passed posed many challenges for all Canadians. The slowdown in the global economy became more pronounced as the year went on, and this affected households, businesses, and governments alike. The tragedy of 11 September compounded the economic difficulties and issues facing us all. Through this period of rapidly changing circumstances, the Bank met its responsibilities by responding quickly and vigorously to events in order to underpin confidence and support the economy.

With inflation remaining low for the sixth consecutive year, the Canadian economy recorded a strong expansion of about 4 per cent through 1997.

We study the importance of supply constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in house price cycles across geographies in the United States.

We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into DSGE models with boundedly rational agents using simple but optimal first order autoregressive forecasting rules. The Smets-Wouters DSGE model with BLE is estimated and fits well with inflation survey expectations. As a policy application, we show that learning requires a lower degree of interest rate smoothing.

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

This Report outlines recent developments in the Canadian economy that affect the rate of inflation and provides an account of the measures taken by the Bank of Canada to control inflation.

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.