This paper reviews the international business cycle among Group of Seven (G-7) countries since 1973 from two angles. An examination of business cycle synchronization among these countries using simple descriptive statistics shows that synchronized slowdowns have been the norm rather than the...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes macroeconomic fluctuations in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper describes data, along with the estimation technique used to ensure stationarity of the data. The empirical regularities of macroeconomic fluctuations in the ECCU are...

This paper has examined Papua New Guinea's historical economic growth patterns through a simple growth accounting framework. The analysis shows that swings in growth are mostly accounted for by a significant slowdown in capital input and lower Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth. It also...

Time series on economic activity in developing countries, in particular real GDP, are reported with important lags. Therefore, it is useful to construct indicators that coincide or lead the actual direction and level of economic activity. A general methodology to construct these indicators is...

The main purpose of this paper is to construct a financial conditions index (FCI) for South Africa. The analysis extracts the index by applying two alternative approaches (principal component analysis and Kalman filter), which identify an unobservable common factor from a group of external and...

This paper develops and estimates a general equilibrium rational expectations model with search and multiple equilibria where aggregate shocks have a permanent effect on the unemployment rate. If agents' wealth decreases, the unemployment rate increases for a potentially indefinite period. This...

The paper examines the determinants of employment growth, drawing on data available across a sample of Caribbean countries. To that end, the paper analyzes estimates of the employment-output elasticity and the response of employment growth to major sources of labor market determinants, in the...

This Selected Issues paper for Chile describes the postcrisis recovery experience. The recovery from the 2008–2009 global crisis has been markedly different both among advanced and emerging economies. The steady improvement in the labor wedge-distortions related to the consumption leisure...