The level of potential output plays a central role in the Bank of Canada's new Quarterly Projection Model (QPM). This report describes a general method to measure potential output, as well as its implementation in the QPM system. The report begins with a short history of the measurement of potential output. Building on this experience, a hybrid method of measuring potential output is developed that combines economic structure with a time-series filter. The resulting filter, known as the extended multivariate (EMV) filter, exploits theoretical relationships that are embodied in QPM in an effort to identify demand-side and supply-side influences on output. These various relationships are combined in a filter that imposes a smoothness property on the dynamics of potential output. The report describes the general structure of the EMV filter, the various economic relationships that it uses, and the weights applied to these different pieces of information. It concludes with an evaluation of the EMV filter and some suggestions for future improvements.

This paper outlines the key features of the production version of the quarterly projection model (QPM), which is a forward-looking open-economy gap model, calibrated to represent the Indian case, for generating forecasts and risk assessment as well as conducting policy analysis. QPM incorporates several India-specific features like the importance of the agricultural sector and food prices in the inflation process; features of monetary policy transmission and implications of an endogenous credibility process for monetary policy formulation. The paper also describes key properties and historical decompositions of some important macroeconomic variables.

In recent years the Bank of Canada has made important changes in the way it conducts monetary policy. In particular, the bank has adopted explicit inflation targets and introduced significant changes to its operational framework designed to increase transparency and reduce market uncertainty. This paper examines the key issues associated with the recent changes in the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy framework and analyzes various indicators of central bank credibility.

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. We discuss briefly the extension of our convergence results to applications with non-linear models, but the strong analytical conclusions for linear systems do not necessarily carry over to non-linear systems. We illustrate the analytical discussion and provide some evidence on comparative solution times and on the robustness of the procedures, using simulations of a simple, linear model of a hypothetical economy and of two much larger, non-linear models of the Canadian economy developed at the Bank of Canada.

This is the third of a series of papers that are being written as part of a larger project to estimate a small quarterly Global Projection Model (GPM). The GPM project is designed to improve the toolkit for studying both own-country and cross-country linkages. In this paper, we estimate a small quarterly projection model of the US, Euro Area, and Japanese economies that incorporates oil prices and allows us to trace out the effects of shocks to oil prices. The model is estimated with Bayesian techniques. We show how the model can be used to construct efficient baseline forecasts that incorporate judgment imposed on the near-term outlook.

This paper outlines the key features of the production version of the quarterly projection model (QPM), which is a forward-looking open-economy gap model, calibrated to represent the Indian case, for generating forecasts and risk assessment as well as conducting policy analysis. QPM incorporates several India-specific features like the importance of the agricultural sector and food prices in the inflation process; features of monetary policy transmission and implications of an endogenous credibility process for monetary policy formulation. The paper also describes key properties and historical decompositions of some important macroeconomic variables.

Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.