Staff research, Publications
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Statistical Confidence Intervals for the Bank of Canada's Business Outlook Survey
While a number of central banks publish their own business conditions indicators that rely on non-random sampling, knowledge about their statistical accuracy has been limited. -
The Fisher BCPI: The Bank of Canada’s New Commodity Price Index
The prices of commodities produced in Canada have important implications for the performance of the Canadian economy and the conduct of monetary policy. The authors explain an important change to the methodology used to construct the Bank of Canada commodity price index (BCPI). -
Relative Price Movements and Labour Productivity in Canada: A VAR Analysis
In recent years, the Canadian economy has been affected by strong movements in relative prices brought about by the surging costs of energy and non-energy commodities, with significant implications for the terms of trade, the exchange rate, and the allocation of resources across Canadian sectors and regions. -
April 22, 2010
Monetary Policy Report – April 2010
Global economic growth has been somewhat stronger than projected, with momentum in emerging-market economies increasing noticeably. -
Prospects for Global Current Account Rebalancing
The authors use the Bank of Canada's version of the Global Economy Model, a multi-country, multi-sector dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking system (the BoC-GEM-FIN), to study the evolution of global current account balances following the recent global financial crisis. -
Le pouvoir de prévision des indices PMI
The forecast of world economic growth plays a key role in the conduct of Canadian monetary policy. In this context, the authors study the usefulness of the monthly Purchasing Managers’ Indexes (PMIs) in predicting short-term real GDP growth in the euro area, Japan, the United Kingdom, and China, as well as in the world economy. -
April 16, 2010
Senior Loan Officer Survey - First-Quarter 2010
The survey results point to an overall easing in business-lending conditions during the first quarter of 2010, following a stabilization of lending conditions in the last quarter of 2009. Both the price and non-price aspects of business lending eased during the first quarter. -
April 12, 2010
Business Outlook Survey - Spring 2010
On balance, firms expect sales growth to pick up over the next 12 months, and plan to increase investment spending and employment. Their investment plans are increasingly being targeted at expansion and at improving efficiency to promote future growth. -
On the Advantages of Disaggregated Data: Insights from Forecasting the U.S. Economy in a Data-Rich Environment
The good forecasting performance of factor models has been well documented in the literature. While many studies focus on a very limited set of variables (typically GDP and inflation), this study evaluates forecasting performance at disaggregated levels to examine the source of the improved forecasting accuracy, relative to a simple autoregressive model. We use the latest revision of over 100 U.S. time series over the period 1974-2009 (monthly and quarterly data).