The paper provides an assessment of the effect of the recent revision of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) on the European economies. A set of structural VARs, one for each Eurozone country, is estimated. The estimated models are then used to assess the possible effect of alternative sets of...

This paper analyses two features of concern to policy-makers in the countries of the prospective European Monetary Union: the solvency of their government’s finances; and the accuracy of fiscal forecasts. Extending the existing methodology of solvency tests, the paper finds that, with few...

The paper reports strikingly high correlations of the cyclical components of industrial production between the participant countries in the ERM. Supplementing these correlations with criteria based on real exchange rate volatility, trade and monetary policy conformity, cluster analysis is used...

Abstract: This paper studies the intranational business cycle - that is the set of regional (prefecture) business cycles - in Japan. One reason for choosing to examine the Japanese case is that long time series and relatively detailed data are available. A Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied to...

This Paper aims at improving the understanding of the transmission of shocks across countries and how this transmission may have changed over time. By employing a model that allows for parameter changes across regimes, we show that transmission of shocks from the US to European countries may...

This paper examines the performance of alternative models for predicting turning points in the UK growth cycle. The models are based upon an interpretation of movements in the CSO's composite longer and shorter leading indicators. The difference between the models lies in the choice of method...

In this Paper we compare alternative approaches for dating the euro area business cycle and analysing its characteristics. First, we extend a commonly used dating procedure to allow for length, size and amplitude restrictions, and to compute the probability of a phase change. Second, we apply...

This paper studies the international business cycle behaviour across 25 advanced and emerging market economies for which 125 years of annual GDP data are available. The picture that emerges is more fragmented than the one drawn by studies that focused on a narrower set of advanced market...

This paper deals with the existence and identification of a common European Growth Cycle. It has recently been argued that the formation of a monetary union creates in itself a tendency for business cycle symmetry to emerge. If this holds for the European monetary Union and the quasi-union of...

The paper uses annual data on real GDP for the UK regions and 12 manufacturing sectors to derive regional and regional/sectoral business cycles using an H-P filter. The cohesion of the cycles is examined via cross-correlations and comparisons made with the regional cycles for Japan, the United...