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We study food inflation rates for Canadian households during periods of low and high inflation from 2012Q4 to 2023Q4. Households experienced more varied inflation rates during the recent high inflation. Cumulative food inflation has been 2.2 percentage points higher for lower-income households than for highest-income households since the inflation surge.

Given technological advances and the widespread use of the Internet, various digital currencies have emerged. In most cases, Internet platforms such as Facebook and Amazon restrict the functionality of their digital currencies to enhance the business model and maximize their profits. While platform-based digital currencies could increase the efficiency of retail payments, they could also raise some important policy issues if they were to become widely used outside of the platform. Thus, it is important to closely monitor the evolution of these digital currencies.

During the 1990s the Bank of Canada made several changes that transformed its conduct of monetary policy. In the 1960s and 1970s, policy decisions were made in an environment characterized by instrument opaqueness and goal opaqueness, which tended to shield the Bank's operations from scrutiny and accountability. Since the 1970s the Bank has moved towards transparency and openness by rejecting multiple policy instruments and adopting a single, well-defined goal of inflation control. A recent survey has shown that the Bank of Canada is in the middle range of central banks with regard to its transparency and has lost points for not publishing the forecasts that shape its policy or the minutes and voting records of its governing body. Chant suggests that the public has benefited significantly from the changes the Bank has made, but that it should continue to support research on the benefits of low and stable inflation and continually inform other policy-makers and the public of the results.

The dramatic reduction in global demand, and the decline in the spot price of crude oil in the second half of last year, may have significant implications for the future supply of oil. Investments in conventional methods of extraction have been constrained, since easily accessible oil reserves are typically concentrated in countries with geopolitical uncertainty and/or state-run oil companies.

Policy-makers around the world met the intensification of the global financial crisis at the end of 2008 with a forceful response aimed at restoring confidence in the global financial system, promoting the flow of credit, and supporting economic activity.

FSR Highlights - June 2009

Erratum: Legends for Chart 13 on page 15 of the June 2009 issue should read: Argentina (right scale), Mexico (left scale). See revised chart.

This report discusses the decision not to designate the Automated Clearing Settlement System as a systemically important system, as well as some of the research contributing to that decision.

We build a tractable New Keynesian model to study and compare four types of monetary and fiscal policy: policy rate adjustments, quantitative easing, lump-sum fiscal transfers and government spending. We find that tax-financed fiscal policy is more stimulative than debt-financed policy, and optimal policy coordination needs at least two of these four policy instruments.

Recent research on the new Phillips curve (NPC) (e.g., Galí, Gertler, and López-Salido 2001a) gives marginal cost an important role in capturing pressures on inflation. In this paper we assess the case for using alternative measures of marginal cost to improve the empirical fit of the NPC.

A key issue in the renewal of the inflation-control agreement is the question of the appropriate level of the inflation target. Many observers have raised concerns that with the reduction in the neutral rate, and the experience of the recent financial crisis, the effective lower bound (ELB) is more likely to be binding in the future if inflation targets remain at 2 per cent.

The purpose of our paper is to examine the profitability and social desirability of both domestic and foreign mergers in a location-quantity competition model, where we allow for the possibility of hollowing-out of the target firm. We refer to hollowing-out as the situation where the target firm is shut down following a merger with a domestic or foreign acquirer.