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 presents a statistical analysis of revisions in quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) of the Group of Twenty countries (G-20) since 2000. The main objective is to assess whether the reliability of early estimates of quarterly GDP has been weakened from the turmoil of the 2008...

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 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...

We combine micro and macro unemployment duration data to study the effects of the business cycle on the outflow from unemployment. We allow the cycle to affect individual exit probabilities of unemployed workers as well as the composition of the total inflow into unemployment. We estimate the...

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...

A two-step procedure to produce a statistical measure of the probability of being in an accelerating or deccelerating phase of economic activity is proposed.