Staff discussion papers
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Global Commodity Markets and Rebalancing in China: The Case of Copper
Given that China accounts for about half of global copper consumption, it is reasonable to expect that any significant change in Chinese copper consumption will have an impact on the global market. -
Non-Bank Financial Intermediation in Canada: An Update
Non-bank financing provides an important funding source for the economy and is a valuable alternative to traditional banking. It helps enhance the efficiency and resiliency of the financial system while giving customers more choices for their financial services. Unlike banking, it is not prudentially regulated. -
Crypto ‘Money’: Perspective of a Couple of Canadian Central Bankers
The market for cryptoassets has exploded in size in the 10 years since bitcoin was launched. The technology underlying cryptoassets, blockchain, has also been held up as a technology that promises to transform entire industries. -
Credibility, Flexibility and Renewal: The Evolution of Inflation Targeting in Canada
In 1991, Canada became the second country to adopt an inflation target as a central pillar of its monetary policy framework. The regime has proven much more successful than initially expected, both in achieving price stability and in stabilizing the real economy against a wide range of shocks. -
2017 Methods-of-Payment Survey Report
Cash use is declining while contactless and mobile payments are on the rise. -
Fundamental Drivers of Existing Home Sales in Canada
Existing home sales’ share of Canada’s economic pie has been rising in recent years, and variation around this trend has resulted in outsized contributions to changes in real gross domestic product (GDP). In this context, we use a cointegration framework to estimate the level of resale activity across the Canadian provinces that is supported by fundamentals—namely, full-time employment, housing affordability and migration flows—to help look through the volatility. -
Alternative Futures for Government of Canada Debt Management
This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada’s debt without increasing the debt’s risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus lowering their cost at issuance. -
An Alternative Estimate of Canadian Potential Output: The Multivariate State-Space Framework
In this paper, we extend the state-space methodology proposed by Blagrave et al. (2015) and decompose Canadian potential output into trend labour productivity and trend labour input. As in Blagrave et al. (2015), we include output growth and inflation expectations from consensus forecasts to help refine our estimates. -
Assessing Vulnerabilities in Emerging-Market Economies
This paper introduces a new tool to monitor economic and financial vulnerabilities in emerging-market economies. We obtain vulnerability indexes for several early warning indicators covering 26 emerging markets from 1990 to 2017 and use them to monitor the evolution of vulnerabilities before, during and after an economic or financial crisis.