Search

Since the last Report, the Canadian economy has advanced broadly in line with expectations.

In the last half-year, the economic expansion in Canada has become well established, supported by low inflation, highly stimulative monetary conditions, and a strong U.S. economy.

This is the second in a series of semi-annual reports designed to increase the transparency and understanding of Canadian monetary policy.

During the past six months, global economic uncertainties have intensified, largely as a result of developments in emerging-market economies.

Two major issues dominate the analysis and policy discussion in this Monetary Policy Report: the nature and extent of the global economic slowdown that began late last year and the consequences of the terrorist attacks in the United States.

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows and characterizes the extent to which it changes the cost and demand structure of exporting.

Over the past year, Canada’s economy has outperformed the economies of virtually all the other major industrial countries.

In the April Monetary Policy Report, the Bank noted that inflation was well above its 2 per cent target and that short-term inflation expectations had edged up.

The exponential family, relative entropy, and distortion are methods of transforming probability distributions. We establish a link between those methods, focusing on the relation between relative entropy and distortion.

In this paper known results about the equivalence of state space and autoregressive moving-average models with exogenous inputs (ARMAX) (including vector auto-regressive or VAR models) are reviewed. While most of these results are not new, no single reference appears to bring together several important related points.