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The global economy has continued to grow at a robust pace since the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

The Canadian economy continued to expand robustly in 2000 while inflation remained low.

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

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.

Household debt can be an important source of vulnerability to the financial system. This technical report describes the Household Risk Assessment Model (HRAM) that has been developed at the Bank of Canada to stress test household balance sheets at the individual level.

Exporters frequently change their market destinations. This paper introduces a new approach to identifying the drivers of these decisions over time. Analysis of customs data from China and the UK shows most changes are driven by demand rather than supply-related shocks.

We develop a principal-agent model of cyber-attacking with fee-paying clients who delegate security decisions to financial platforms. We derive testable implications about clients’ vulnerability to cyber attacks and about the fees charged.

We study competition for consumer attention, in which platforms can sacrifice service quality for attention. A platform can choose the “addictiveness” of its service.

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

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.