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The ultimate goal of Canadian monetary policy is to help our economy achieve its maximum sustainable growth, and thus contribute to rising living standards for Canadians. The best way to achieve this goal, we've learned from experience, is to keep inflation low, stable, and predictable.

Canada’s economy is expected to grow by 2 1/2 per cent this year and just below 2 per cent in 2018 and 2019.

Examining the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high; an outline of the complexity inherent in any modern risk-management system and review of possible strategies to improve the performance of risk management; causes and consequences of the changing pace of labour reallocation in Canada; description of the structure and functioning of BoC-GEM— an adaptation of the Global Economy Model— with examples of its recent application.

The federal government and the Bank of Canada have been committed for some time to achieving and maintaining price stability as a way to foster a rising standard of living for all Canadians. To support this objective, the inflation-control target range of 1 to 3 per cent was recently extended through to the end of 2001. By then, the government and the Bank plan to announce a long-run target for monetary policy. In this article, the authors provide an overview of the most recent empirical evidence on the benefits of lower inflation. They draw on an extensive earlier survey and on work presented at two recent conferences on price stability hosted by the Bank of Canada. They find that, when inflation and tax interactions are taken into account, there are large benefits to lowering inflation. When these benefits are compared with the transitional costs associated with lowering inflation, significant positive benefits remain. However, the authors note that the extension of the inflation-control targets to the end of 2001 allows further research to ensure an operational definition of price stability that will help Canadians achieve a high standard of living.

This paper presents updated estimates of potential output growth for the global economy through 2022. Global potential output growth is expected to decline sharply in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and recover partially by the end of the projection horizon of the October 2020 Monetary Policy Report.

Firms that grow rapidly have the potential to usher in new innovations, products or processes (Kogan et al. 2017), become superstar firms (Haltiwanger et al. 2013) and impact the aggregate labour share (Autor et al. 2020; De Loecker et al. 2020). We explore the use of supervised machine learning techniques to identify a population of nascent high-growth firms using Canadian administrative firm-level data.

When players repeatedly face an identical or similar game (e.g., coordination game, technology adoption game, or product choice game), they may learn through experience to perform better in the future. This learning behaviour has important economic implications.

In this analytical note, we provide a comprehensive assessment of the complex structural adjustment facing the Canadian economy following the commodity price decline since mid-2014. We quantify separately the impacts coming from the commodity sector restructuring and the broader effect of significantly lower terms of trade.

Although the standard of living of Canadians has improved as a result of terms-of-trade gains created by the sharp rise in real commodity prices over the past five years or so, the commodity-price increase, combined with an exchange rate appreciation and real income gain, triggered structural adjustments by altering underlying economic incentives. The frictions generated in adjusting to the relative price shock have likely contributed to hold back aggregate productivity growth. Dupuis and Marcil examine the structural adjustments that have been required-in particular, the resource reallocation among the different sectors of the economy-and its effects on employment, output, and productivity, as well as the responses of final domestic demand and external trade flows.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.