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Productivity plays a critical role when it comes to our national standard of living. Productivity growth is the main element that contributes to continued improvements in real incomes and overall prosperity. Rising productivity lets businesses pay higher wages, while keeping costs down, employment high, and profits coming in. That's why economists like me spend a lot of time thinking about ways to improve the productivity of our economy.

In this report, we describe methods for solving economic models when expectations are presumed to have at least some element of consistency with the predictions of the model itself. We present analytical results that establish the convergence properties of alternative solution procedures for linear models with unique solutions. Only one method is guaranteed to converge, […]

The Bank of Canada launched the Bankers’ Acceptance Purchase Facility (BAPF) to ensure that the bankers’ acceptance (BA) market could continue to function well during the financial crisis induced by the COVID‑19 pandemic. We review the impact that the announcement of this facility had on BA yields in the secondary market. We find that BA yield spreads declined by 15 basis points on the day of the announcement and by up to 70 basis points over a longer period. Using an econometric framework, we quantify the effect of the announcement and confirm early assertions presented in the Bank’s 2020 Financial System Review.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins discusses key issues involved in the Governing Council’s deliberations about the policy rate decision and the MPR.

In 2024, the Bank of Canada reviewed and updated its Contingent Term Repo Facility policy, incorporating lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and other global market developments, such as the UK gilt crisis in September 2022. This paper accompanies the March 17, 2025, Contingent Term Repo Facility market notice and provides background information and further details about the design of the revised policy.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

The growth rates of both aggregate factor and labour productivity in Canada fell substantially during the period 1975-83. This paper examines this phenomenon and reviews a number of possible explanations for it. First, the productivity growth slowdown is examined at various levels of industry disaggregation. It is apparent from this analysis that the slowdown varied […]

Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods.

Governor Poloz talks about how the Bank is improving communications with the public and helping financial markets understand its monetary policy approach.