Finance committee  Yes, for the U.S. economy.

Finance committee  Again, the approach that we take is very fine-tuned in the sense that we look at the main external factors, such as the U.S. economy, commodity prices, consumer confidence, as well as domestic factors. Per se we don't have an explicit forecast for the euro area. Again, we would l

Finance committee  Sure. In terms of the average real GDP growth over the five years, it's the same as the private sector. It's just the profile.... The difference on nominal GDP, then, would stem from differences in projections of GDP inflation. I would suspect that our GDP inflation is higher, p

Finance committee  Our U.S. forecast is largely based off of private sector organizations in the U.S. We would follow some of the leading macroeconomic forecasters there, as well as the IMF. I think it would line up closer to those forecasters, as opposed to the Canadian private sector forecasters.

Finance committee  Our approach to doing the projection is to present what we consider to be a balanced approach, so that there's an equal likelihood that the projection could come in worse or better. Typically most forecasters, when they construct their forecasts, are trying to come up with, let's

Finance committee  No, ours would be a balanced projection, so we would judge it to be approximately equal of being higher or lower. Again, this is largely subjective.

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  We do not have a precise estimate for that. It is more of a comprehensive estimate. It might include both.

Finance committee  We haven't identified the specific factors for the level of unemployment being below its estimated trend, but, yes, you're correct that in the third quarter of 2012, the actual level of employment is roughly 130,000 jobs below what we estimate as its trend level.

Finance committee  Unfortunately, we don't have a longer time series on the labour market tightness. It's a relatively recent series from Statistics Canada. While we can see the change in employment over the cycle, we can't really evaluate it in terms of the vacancy ratio.

Finance committee  I think it could be the case that previously there was a very high vacancy ratio, and now it's been reduced, but we do not know that for certain.

Finance committee  Exactly. We don't have the data.

Finance committee  Yes, in our projection it does reflect the economic impact of government spending reductions and restraint measures, to date. Of course, all else equal, we estimate that the level of real GDP would be 1% higher in the absence of the federal spending reductions and restraint.

Finance committee  In this report, we didn't want to go into too much depth on underlying causes and provide an analysis. It was largely descriptive in nature. The comments that the governor made previously on labour market mobility and removing interprovincial trade barriers are standard proposals

Finance committee  Our assumption on the Bank of Canada's interest rate is largely based with the view that the Federal Reserve is keeping their rate stable, very low, for an extended period of time. If we were to have increases beyond that, modest increases in interest rates, which we do have in o