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This monthly newsletter features the latest research publications by Bank of Canada economists including external publications and working papers published on the Bank of Canada’s website.

For the first time in two years, firms, on balance, reported an improvement in their past sales activity. While the balances of opinion on future sales growth and investment are lower than in recent surveys, and firms are concerned about global uncertainties, overall, they are positive about the outlook for business activity over the next 12 months.

The risks around inflation are unusually high. The main risk is associated with trade relations with the United States. The war in the Middle East presents a new risk.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a major shift away from the use of paper-based retail payment instruments, such as cash and cheques, toward electronic means of payment, such as debit cards and credit cards. Recent Bank of Canada research on consumers’ choice of payment instruments indicates that cash is frequently used for transactions with low values because of its speed, ease of use and wide acceptance, while debit and credit cards are more commonly used for transactions with higher values because of perceived attributes such as safety and record keeping. While innovations in retail payments currently being introduced into the Canadian marketplace could lead to a further reduction in the use of cash over the longer term, the implications for the use of cash of some of the structural and regulatory developments under way are less clear.

The Annual Report outlines the Bank’s activities and achievements in 2016. It includes the financial statements and a message from Governor Stephen S. Poloz.

I study how banking market concentration and reliance on wholesale funding affect monetary policy transmission to mortgage rates. I find that this transmission is imperfect and dampens the response of consumption, output, and housing prices.

The Canadian economy has come through the financial volatility and global economic slowdown of the past few years quite well and has started 1999 on a strong note, Bank of Canada Governor Gordon Thiessen told members of La Chambre de Commerce de la région sherbrookoise today.

The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have sparked a lively debate in Canada about the possible benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency. Some observers have suggested that this debate is largely irrelevant, since Canada is already highly "dollarized." Canadian businesses and households, they assert, often use the U.S. dollar to perform standard money functions in preference to their own currency. Very little evidence has been provided, however, to support these claims. The authors review the available data with a view to drawing some tentative conclusions about the extent to which Canada has already been informally dollarized. The evidence suggests that many of the concerns that have been expressed about the imminent demise of the Canadian dollar have been misplaced. The Canadian dollar continues to be used as the principal unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value within our borders. Moreover, there is no indication that dollarization is likely to take hold in the foreseeable future. Indeed, in many respects, the Canadian economy is less dollarized now than it was 20 years ago.

The COVID-19 pandemic uncovered policy challenges related to the economic measures that were taken to support the economy. Two years later, we attempt to identify the broader impact of these measures and research that needs to follow.

We study the causal effect of mortgage rate changes on consumer spending, debt repayment and defaults during an expansionary and a contractionary monetary policy episode in Canada. We find asymmetric responses of consumer durable spending, deleveraging and defaults. These findings help us to understand household sector response to interest rate changes.