This paper investigates the patterns and determinants of the co-movement of economic activity between regions in the European Union and the Euro Area. Using a panel data of 208 EU-15 regions over the period 1989-2002 we estimate a system of four simultaneous equations to analyse the impact of...

Several countries at the core of the Euro area have experienced coincident business cycles during the most recent decades, while the Danish economy seemed detached from these cycles during the 1980's and part of the 1990's. To a large degree, the decoupling of the Danish economy reflects...

This paper estimates forward-looking Taylor rules for the euro area. Using the asymmetries in inflation and cyclical output developments across countries, we investigate the adequacy of the single monetary policy for each of the EuropeanMonetary Union (EMU) member countries. Notable differences...

In this paper I discuss various notions and aspects of integration and macroeconomic convergence, namely economic and monetary integration; real and nominal convergence. The EU has offered a great deal of information about the relation between all these types of integration and macroeconomic...

We develop multivariate measures of synchronicity and co-movement of business cycles. In addition to synchronicity, the co-movement measure takes differences between cycle amplitudes into account that have been overlooked in most previous studies. We apply the new measures to the euro area....