Since 1991, the Bank of Canada has had an inflation‐targeting (IT) framework established by a joint agreement between the Bank and the Government of Canada. The framework is reviewed every five years as part of the process for renewing the inflation‐control agreement. This discussion paper...

Recent international experience with the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates has rekindled interest in the benefits of inflation targets above 2 per cent. We evaluate whether an increase in the inflation target to 3 or 4 per cent could improve macroeconomic stability in the Canadian...

This report provides a detailed technical description of an updated version of the Terms-of-Trade Economic Model (ToTEM II), which replaced ToTEM (Murchison and Rennison 2006) in June 2011 as the Bank of Canada’s quarterly projection model for Canada. ToTEM has been improved along a number of...

This article describes changes to the structure of ToTEM—the Bank of Canada’s main model for projection and policy analysis—that allow an independent role for long-term interest rates, as well as for the risk spreads that lead to differences in the interest rates faced by households, firms...

The international community has a role to play in addressing this gap. In that regard, this paper is intended to stimulate debate on the problems in the current practices for sovereign debt restructuring and puts forward some proposals to improve the functioning of sovereign debt markets. The...

For central banks, conducting policy in an environment of uncertainty is a daily fact of life. This uncertainty can take many forms, ranging from incomplete knowledge of the correct economic model and data to future economic and geopolitical events whose precise magnitudes and effects cannot be...