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

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

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

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.

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

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

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.

There have been a number of significant economic and financial developments since the time of the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

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.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to developments in the global economy.