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The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.

The Canadian economy continues to grow at a solid pace, consistent with the Bank’s outlook in the January Monetary Policy Report Update.

We estimate the effects of economic uncertainty on time use and discuss its macroeconomic implications. We develop a model to demonstrate that substitution between market and non-market work provides an additional insurance margin to households, weakening precautionary savings and labour supply and lowering aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying the contractionary effects of uncertainty.

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

We model non-bank entry into fixed-income markets and state-dependent liquidity. Non-bank financial institutions improve liquidity more during normal times than in stress. Banks may become less reliable to marginal clients, exacerbating the difference in liquidity between normal and stressed times. Central bank lending during stress may limit this harmful division.

This Report presents the Bank of Canada’s assessment of the trend of inflation in Canada and explains the monetary policy actions deemed necessary to keep inflation within the Bank’s inflation-control target range.

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

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.