Almost there: EDC's Canadian Economy Recovery Tracker (CERT) is showing significant recent progress, driven by big improvements in COVID cases and loosening government restrictions edc.ca/en/guide/edc-c…#CdnEcon
...Here are the COVID indicators, which are looking much, much better than in May.
...The Canadian price of oil continues to climb higher.
...As provincial governments across the country continue to loosen their restrictions, personal mobility is getting back closer to pre-COVID levels.
...Canada's over-heating housing market has started to slow from the spring, but online job postings and consumer spending remain strong.
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...Our goal in this paper was to analyze the potential to increase Canada’s exports and foreign direct investment abroad.
To do so, we constructed a unique administrative dataset @StatCan_eng with detailed information for millions of firms that operated in Canada from 2010-15.
...Our big research challenge: how do you identify “potential” exporters?
In the past, people surveyed firms to ask if they could become future exporters.
But you might worry that approach may be unreliable, if some firms say “yes”, even if they aren’t serious exporters.
Tip 1: To deconstruct the budget, first consider its construction:
Fundamentally, this is an exercise in assembling the evidence that best supports the government’s narrative, not necessarily to provide a comprehensive, objective view of the economy or the fiscal situation.
Our survey corroborates other indicators for May, which suggest the Canadian economy has turned the corner—tentatively emerging from the worst of the global pandemic, and taking the first steps on road to recovery.
...Business re-openings are slowly proceeding, in a tentative phased-in approach (although many are still operating well below capacity).
Of the 54% of respondents who had closed their physical store locations:
I've heard this refrain a lot in the lat few weeks.
It's too hard to forecast right now, so we won't attempt to do so.
What do you think?
...As someone who has spent many years forecasting, this reaction strikes me as incredible --- especially among forecasters.
Of course any point forecast will be wrong, it was also so.
...But one key point of a forecast --- is *the exercise* of doing the forecast.
It forces you to sit down, as a collective team, reflect, educate yourself on recent developments and importantly use data, analysis and modelling to quantify a complicated and uncertain world.