Search

This article summarizes the proceedings of an international research conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 2000. The conference marked the fiftieth anniversary of Canada's adoption of a flexible exchange rate, and its title recognizes the seminal contribution of Professor Milton Friedman's article "The Case for Flexible Exchange Rates." His keynote address to the conference is also summarized in the article. The conference papers re-examine many of the arguments raised by Friedman using recent developments in economic theory and econometric techniques. They investigate the experience of a wide range of industrialized and emerging-market economies. The main findings are that a strong case can be made for flexible exchange rates in economies that are large commodity exporters and that have credible low-inflation monetary policies and relatively well-developed financial systems.

Three major interrelated global developments are having a profound impact on the Canadian economy and making the outlook more uncertain than it was at the time of the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

We construct a dataset on Federal Reserve and Bank of Canada non-rate announcement events to provide novel insights into how foreign and domestic monetary policy communications affect the financial markets of open economies. We find that Fed non-rate communications have a stronger impact on long-term interest rates and stock futures, while Bank of Canada communications are relatively more important for short-term interest rates and the exchange rate.

The authors assess the stabilization properties of simple monetary policy rules within the context of a small open-economy model constructed around the limited-participation assumption and calibrated to salient features of the Canadian economy. By relying on limited participation as the main nominal friction that affects the artificial economy, the authors provide an important check of the robustness of the results obtained using alternative environments in the literature on monetary policy rules, most notably the now-standard "New Keynesian" paradigm that emphasizes rigidities in the price-setting mechanism.

Growth in the Canadian economy is projected to reach 2.8 per cent this year before slowing to 2.0 per cent next year and 1.6 per cent in 2019.

The inflation targeting (IT) regime is 17 years old. With practice of IT now in more than 21 countries, there is enough evidence gathered to take stock of the IT experience. In this paper, we analyze the inflation record of IT central banks.

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price uncertainty can be examined in a more flexible yet tractable way.

In a speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade, Governor Mark Carney discusses the fundamentals of the Canadian residential real estate market, the international context, and the implications for monetary policy.

On 23 January, the Bank reduced the Bank Rate by one-quarter of one percentage point to 5 3/4 per cent.

An international initiative to increase the use of central clearing for OTC derivatives emerged as one of the reactions to the 2008 financial crisis. The move to central clearing is a fundamental change in the structure of the market.