Business Cycles in EU Member States

The paper investigates the business cycle relationships between the EU-15, the EU-11, as well as the EU-core countries for the period 1971 to 1997. Emphasis is put on the question whether there is a synchronization in the national business cycles or not. Using One-way- and Twoway-Anova techniques the results show that country-specific shocks are important to the smaller countries such as Luxembourg, Ireland, Portugal, and Finland. But for most of the EMU-members common shocks are much more important than country-specific shocks. In addition there is no indication of significant differences in the national growth rates, i.e. the European countries do not move along diverging growth paths. Nevertheless, departures over the business cycles are possible because persistence in output growth differs across countries.