Trend productivity growth is a crucial determinant of future living standards as well as fiscal balances. In this article, Benoit Robidoux and Bing-Sun Wong from Finance Canada examine the issue of whether trend productivity growth has increased in Canada and conclude that in fact it has. If...

The Canadian Economic and Fiscal Model (CEFM) is used by the Department of Finance to forecast key economic and fiscal indicators as well as to simulate the economic and fiscal effects of policy or economic changes. This paper documents the dynamic forecasting and simulation properties of the...

The first version of the Canadian Economic and Fiscal Model (CEFM) was completed in 1986. Since then, CEFM has been used by the Department of Finance for macroeconomic forecasting and policy analysis. The model has gone through many rounds of revision since its original version. This report...

The presence of a structural break in the volatility of GDP growth has important implications for economic modelling and econometric techniques. Recently, McConnell and Quiros (1997, 2000) have identified a structural decline in the U.S. GDP growth volatility in 1984, and they attributed the...

Following the 1993 recommendation of the United Nations System of National Accounts, Statistics Canada has switched to using the Fisher chain formula as the official measure to record real expenditure-based GDP in the national accounts in May 2001. This eliminates the substitution-bias problem...