I think the main conclusion of the paper, whether or not we did suffer from a mild case of Dutch disease, is not that interesting anymore. That was largely something that happened before the recession. The dollar has been at parity since 2007. If you were a business out there you were waiting for the dollar to go back to 63ยข to make your business viable, you went out of business a long time ago. If you're in business today, you have shown you are profitable at parity. It's been six years. It's time to move on from this debate. We're at parity. The business sector has adjusted. I thought you had some interesting graphs on how small and medium-sized businesses were exporting despite the high dollar.
I think it's misleading too to put the natural resource sector and the manufacturing sector as in opposition to each other. I touched on that in my opening remarks. You can get that impression. You'd look at the 1990s. One sector did well and the other did poorly. The reverse happened in the 2000s. It's too easy to conclude from that that we have to pick one or the other because we can't have both. Well, in the recovery since 2009, we've had growth in both sectors, the manufacturing and natural resources, and that's with parity with the U.S. exchange rate.
If you ask firms if they are bothered by the dollar, and whether this is a major constraint in their business plans today, they say no. In fact, 75% to 80% of manufacturers entering 2013 were quite optimistic about their business. They've moved on, and I think the public debate should too.