Are European business cycles close enough to be just one? [An article from: Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, published by Elsevier in 2006. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We propose a comprehensive methodology to characterize the business cycle comovements across European economies and some industrialized countries, without imposing any given model but trying to 'leave the data speak'. We develop a novel method to show that there is no evidence of a 'European economy' that acts as an attractor to the other economies of the area. We show that the establishment of the Monetary Union has not significantly increased the level of comovements across Euro-area economies. Finally, we are able to explain an important proportion of the distances across their business cycles using macrovariables related to the structure of the economy, to the directions of trade, and to the size of the public sector.