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We investigate the macroeconomic impacts of mothballed businesses—those that closed temporarily—on sectoral equilibrium prices after a negative demand shock. Our results suggest that pandemic fiscal support for temporary closures may have eased inflationary pressures.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins discusses the risks and opportunities for Canada of China’s economic transition.

This paper examines the role of bank credit in modeling and forecasting business cycle fluctuations, and investigates the international transmission of US credit shocks, using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) framework and associated country-specific error correction models.

Narrow Money—Transactions Money The growth rate of the narrow monetary aggregates picked up in 1999, reflecting the expansion in economic activity and the stabilization of interest rates. The sharp acceleration of the narrow aggregates in recent months suggests buoyant growth in GDP in coming quarters. Signs of a possible rise in inflation are also emerging. Over the longer run, for inflation to remain in the Bank's 1 to 3 per cent target range, the growth of narrow money would have to slow down from its current pace. In 1999, the growth rate of M1 also began to converge with that of the other narrow aggregates, M1+ and M1++. This suggests that the influence of the special factors that have been affecting the growth rate of M1 has diminished. Broad Money—"Store of Value" Household savings represent deferred consumption, and therefore the broad monetary aggregate provides information about future spending and, hence, inflation. In 1999, the very broad measure of money, M2++, grew at much the same rate as it did in 1998. This outcome is in line with inflation remaining in the inflation-control target range over the next couple of years.

Consumers often purchase more than one differentiated product, assembling a portfolio, which might potentially affect substitution patterns of demand and, as a consequence, oligopolistic firms’ pricing strategies.

Recent studies find that cash remains a dominant payment choice for small-value transactions despite the prevalence of alternative means of payment such as debit and credit cards. For policy makers an important question is whether consumers truly prefer using cash or merchants restrict card usage.

Lectures delivered by Gordon G. Thiessen, Governor of the Bank of Canada 1994 to 2001

Debt strategy is defined as the manner in which a government finances an excess of government expenditures over revenues and any maturing debt issued in previous periods. The author gives a thorough qualitative description of the complexities of debt strategy analysis and then demonstrates that it is, in fact, a problem in stochastic optimal control.

In the past 25 years, China has introduced numerous reforms, gradually moving from a centrally planned economy towards a socialist market economy capable of robust and sustainable economic growth. China's increasing integration into the global economy, which has been fuelled by this recent and rapid economic growth, has already begun to affect the economies of other countries and to present challenges for policy-makers, both in China and abroad. In addition to examining the determinants of China's past and current growth, the authors consider factors that are likely to support continued growth in the future and assess the implications for both the world and the Canadian economies.

Although a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of the degree of factor utilization in economic analysis, the impact of the durations of utilization in a production function remains largely unknown, particularly in terms of the duration of equipment utilization.