Estimates of monthly Canadian

expenditure-based GDP at market prices

Philip Smith

Last update: September 4, 2023

On this page you can find my estimates of monthly Canadian expenditure-based gross domestic product at market prices. The estimates are available from January 2017 to date and they are seasonally adjusted at annual rates.

These statistics are interpolated from the quarterly national accounts estimates for GDP that are released four times a year by Statistics Canada. The interpolation is done with a linear modelling approach that uses closely related monthly series, mostly from the retail trade survey, the consumer price index survey, the survey of employment, payrolls and hours, the monthly estimates of investment in residential and non-residential construction, manufacturing shipments and inventories, wholesale inventories, monthly international exports and imports of goods and services and the real gross domestic product by industry program. The method was proposed by G. Chow and A. Lin. This approach guarantees that the estimates for three months within a quarter always average to Statistics Canada’s corresponding quarterly estimate, while the month-to-month variations mirror as closely as possible those of the related series.

When the related series data are available for months beyond the last published quarterly estimate, the models are also used to extrapolate the monthly series forward. And when the latest month’s data are unavailable for a particular related series,  auto-regressive integrated moving-average (ARIMA) models are used to fill the gap.

This modelling approach is documented in this paper.

The remainder of this web page displays charts and tables for these monthly estimates. Also provided are spreadsheet files containing the full time series from January 2017 to the latest month, in terms of GDP expenditure value, price and volume.