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A nation's productivity is the prime determinant of its real incomes and standard of living, as well as being a major determinant of its potential output. In the short run, deviations of actual output from potential output are a useful indicator of inflationary pressures. This article is a short summary of the proceedings of the workshop, which focus on productivity and potential output growth among industrialized countries. The research is organized under three main themes: estimating potential growth; productivity and growth; and institutions, policies, and growth.

Over the past 5 years, real energy and non-energy commodity prices have trended sharply higher. These relative price movements have had important implications for inflation and economic activity in both Canada and the rest of the world. China has accounted for the bulk of incremental demand for oil and many base metals over this period.

The types of contracts that arise in a typical vertical manufacturer–retailer relationship are more sophisticated than usually assumed in standard macroeconomic models.

We use a small open economy model with overlapping generations to evaluate secular dynamics of the neutral rate in Canada from 1980 to 2018. We find that changes in both foreign and domestic factors resulted in a protracted decline in the neutral rate.

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.

The impact of COVID-19 on Canadian households’ debt and unplanned savings varies by household income. Low-income and high-income households accrued unplanned savings, while middle-income households tended to accumulate more debt.

This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on the risk-taking behavior of fixed-income mutual funds in Canada. We consider different measures of the stance of monetary policy and investigate active variation in mutual funds’ risk exposure in response to monetary policy.

The uncertainty regarding inflation that is observed in density forecasts of households and professionals helps macroeconomists understand the formation mechanism of inflation expectations. Shocks to inflation take time to be perceived by all agents in the economy, and such rigidity is lower in a high-inflation environment.

Liquidity demands in real-time gross settlement payment systems can be enormous. To reduce the liquidity requirement, central banks around the world have implemented liquidity savings mechanisms (LSMs).

This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy.