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In the year just ended, the global economy faced a number of exceptional challenges, reflecting a wide range of economic, financial, and geopolitical risks and uncertainties. These included the fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, stock market volatility, and developments in the Middle East. Despite this global backdrop, the Canadian economy outperformed virtually all other industrial economies, growing by about 3 1/4 per cent and creating 560,000 jobs, while inflation expectations remained well anchored to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent inflation-control target.

The Canadian economy regained strong momentum in 1999 as the U.S. economy remained vigorous, the global economy recovered, and commodity prices moved upwards.

We introduce a new framework that facilitates term structure modeling with both positive interest rates and flexible time-series dynamics but that is also tractable, meaning amenable to quick and robust estimation.

The global economy has been unfolding largely as expected, and prospects for continued robust growth are quite favourable, especially over the near term.

The author investigates the quantitative importance of the expenditure-switching effect by developing and estimating a structural sticky-price model nesting both producer currency pricing (PCP) and local currency pricing (LCP) settings.

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.

This paper investigates the impact of exchange rate movements on the conduct of monetary policy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We develop and estimate a structural general equilibrium two-sector model with sticky prices and wages and limited exchange rate pass-through.

We study the formation of price bubbles on experimental asset markets where cash earns interest. There are two main conclusions.

Multi-stage production is widely recognized as an important feature of the modern global economy. This feature has been incorporated into many state-of-the-art quantitative trade models, and has been shown to deliver significant additional gains from international trade.

We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers.