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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.

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

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

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.

We develop a model with firm heterogeneity in importing and cross-border shopping among consumers. Exchange-rate appreciations lower the cost of imported goods, but also lead to more cross-border shopping; hence, the net impact on aggregate retail prices and sales is ambiguous.

In 1996 inflation remained within the Bank’s target range but was subject to downward pressure. The low rate of inflation contributed to a major easing in monetary conditions, and interest rates reached their lowest level in 30 years.

This paper relaxes the Bayesian Nash equilibrium (BNE) assumption commonly imposed in empirical discrete choice games with incomplete information. Instead of assuming that players have unbiased/correct expectations, my model treats a player’s belief about the behavior of other players as an unrestricted unknown function. I study the joint identification of belief and payoff functions.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to major global developments.

This equilibrium model explains the trend in long-term yields and business-cycle movements in short-term yields and yield spreads. The less-frequent inverted yield curves (and less-frequent recessions) after the 1990s are due to recent secular stagnation and procyclical inflation expectations.

We propose an open-economy New Keynesian model with financial integration that allows financial intermediaries to hold foreign long-term bonds. We study the implications of financial integration on monetary policy transmission. Among various aspects of financial integration, the bond duration plays a major role. These results hold for conventional and unconventional monetary policies.