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When China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, it marked a watershed for the world economy. Ten years from now, the opening of China’s capital account and the financial integration that will unfold will be viewed as a milestone of similar importance.

This paper examines the cross-border spillovers from major economies’ quantitative easing (QE) policies to their trading partners. We concentrate on spillovers from the US to Canada during the zero lower bound period when QE policies were actively used.

Deposit insurance protects depositors from failing banks, thus making insured deposits risk-free. When a deposit insurance limit is increased, some deposits that previously were uninsured become insured, thereby increasing the share of risk-free assets in households’ portfolios. This increase cannot simply be undone by households, because to invest in uninsured deposits, a household must first invest in insured deposits up to the limit. This basic insight is the starting point of the analysis in this paper.

The emergence of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain and distribution ledger technology have attracted significant attention. These developments have raised the possibility of considerable impacts on the financial system and perhaps the wider economy.

This paper considers an economy where central-bank-issued fiat money competes with privately issued e-money. We study a policy-setting game between the central bank and the e-money issuer and find (1) the optimal monetary policy of the central bank depends on the policy of the private issuer and may deviate from the Friedman rule; (2) multiple equilibria may exist; (3) when the economy approaches a cashless state, the central bank’s optimal policy improves the market power of the e-money issuer and can lead to a discrete decrease in welfare and a discrete increase in inflation; and (4) first best cannot be achieved.

The three articles in this issue provide an overview of the monetary policy decision-making process at the Bank of Canada, a discussion of Bank research on the assessment of vulnerabilities in the financial system and a description of recent fragmentation in Canadian equity markets.

We propose a tool that decomposes TFP growth into sectoral contributions. The analysis incorporates three structural factors—digitalization, aging and climate change policies—and measures their contributions. Overall, we expect that aggregate TFP growth will slow down in the 2020s below both its historical average and the average from the 2010s.

In the field of economics, on average, women tend to produce fewer research articles and be cited less often than men. But this appears to be changing. A newly compiled dataset about scholars at top universities around the world helps us identify where individual gender gaps exist.