Under a federal system of government, the division of responsibilities between the federal, provincial/state, and local levels of government may create internal barriers to trade. To deal with this problem, the federal and provincial governments in Canada established the Agreement on Internal...

It has recently been suggested that allowing for switches between different inflationary regimes produces a much better fit for the Fisher relationship between interest rates and inflation, at least for U.S. data. The paper assesses the merits of the regime-switching theory as an explanation for...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of different labor market adjustment mechanisms in Canada and the United States and also examines the effects of the unemployment insurance (UI) system on labor market adjustment. At the aggregate level, employment growth...

This paper documents the extent of financial linkages between Canada and the United States and explores the impact of changes in U.S. financial conditions on financial conditions and real economic activity in Canada. It shows that close to a quarter of financing by Canadian corporations is...

The staff report on Canada’s 2009 Article IV Consultation examines economic developments and policies. Canadian banks have weathered the crisis better than major-country peers, but the credit cycle will be challenging, particularly given high household debt. Financial instability is a tail...

This Selected Issues paper on Canada examines economic development and policies. Capital ratios before the crisis have been a key determinant of bank performance during the turmoil; and Canadian banks had ample capital. Specifically, most banks with critically low capital at end-2006 later...

The issue of productivity growth in Canada has received considerable attention reflecting its marked slowdown since the early 1970s and concerns about its implications for Canadian competitiveness. To better understand productivity developments in Canada, it is useful to decompose total factor...

This paper builds a Bayesian VAR estimation model of growth for Canada, by focusing specifically on the role of external and domestic financial indicators, including credit conditions. A variance decomposition shows that financial conditions explain one-third of the total variability in...

This paper explores factors behind Canadian banks'' relative resilience in the ongoing credit turmoil. We identify two main causes: a higher share of depository funding (vs. wholesale funding) in liabilities, and a number of regulatory and structural factors in the Canadian market that reduced...

This paper assesses productivity trends in Canada vis-a-vis the United States from two perspectives. The first one is based on estimates of total factor productivity. The second one decomposes productivity growth into two sources: investment-specific technical change, associated with...