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Growth in the Canadian economy has been essentially in line with the expectations set out in the Bank’s January Monetary Policy Report Update.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

Over the last six months, most countries have continued to register strong economic growth.

Canada’s inflation-control targets establish a specific medium-term objective for monetary policy.

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.

The global economy has shown greater strength than was anticipated at the time of the November Report.

This paper examines inefficiencies arising from a lack of long-term contracting in small business lending in China.

We analyze 40 years’ worth of natural disasters using a local projection framework to assess their impact on provincial labour markets in Canada. We find that disasters decrease hours worked within a week and lower wage growth in the medium run. Our study highlights that disasters affect vulnerable workers through the income channel.

How do banks' interconnections in the euro area contribute to the vulnerability of the banking system? We study both the direct interconnections (banks lend to each other) and the indirect interconnections (banks are exposed to similar sectors of the economy). These complex linkages make the banking system more vulnerable to contagion risks.

Using two complementary approaches, we investigate the importance of U.S. macroeconomic news in driving low-frequency fluctuations in the term structure of interest rates in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom. We find that U.S. macroeconomic news is particularly important to explain changes in the expectation components of the nominal, real and break-even inflation rates of small open economies.