In the current slowdown in Europe, the United States and Japan, policy makers are vexed by the question when a recovery will come. This is the wrong question. The issue should be how a higher growth path can be reached in the long run, i.e., how the potential growth rate of our economies can be...

The paper uses quarterly GDP data for some 30 years up to and including 2001, to examine the identity and development of the European business cycle. Cycles are identified by using a band-pass filter version of the Hodrick-Prescott filter and affiliations are examined using clustering techniques...