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The analysis and forecasting of developments in the U.S. economy have always played a critical role in the formulation of Canadian economic and financial policy. Thus, the Bank places considerable importance on generating internal forecasts of U.S. economic activity as an input to the Canadian projection.

The four essays published here provide a useful overview for anyone interested in understanding the issues and policy environment surrounding financial system stability.

In this report, the authors examine and compare twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy with respect to their paradigm, structure, and dynamic properties. These open-economy models can be grouped into two economic paradigms.

With the demise of monetary targeting over the past 20 years in many major countries, the question has arisen as to whether central banks should look at money at all when formulating and conducting monetary policy.

In this report, we evaluate several simple monetary policy rules in twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy. Our results indicate that none of the simple policy rules we examined is robust to model uncertainty, in that no single rule performs well in all models.

The Canadian financial industry continues to experience significant changes. This report provides an update on recent developments and re-examines a number of issues facing financial service providers that were identified in Technical Report No. 82.

The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have spawned an animated debate in Canada concerning the potential benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency.

The Bank of Canada uses core CPI inflation, the year-over-year rate of change of the consumer price index excluding food, energy, and the effects of changes in indirect taxes, as the operational guide for monetary policy.

This paper examines the behaviour of the Canadian dollar from 1997 to 1999 to see if there is any evidence of excess volatility or significant overshooting. A small econometric model of the exchange rate, based on market fundamentals, is presented and used to make tentative judgments about the extent to which the currency might have been systematically over- or undervalued.

This paper first describes the Bank of Canada's approach to the design of large-value clearing and settlement systems. It then examines the way the Bank has operated under the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act, passed by Parliament in July 1996.