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This paper identifies and describes the key features of Australian business cycles during 1959-2000. In particular, we identify the chronologies in Australia's classical cycle (expansions and contractions in the level of output) and growth cycle (periods of above-trend and below-trend rates of economic growth). We find that while there are large asymmetries in the duration and amplitude of phases in Australia's classical cycle, on both measures the Australian growth cycle is much more symmetric. Further, our results indicate that over the sample period Australian (filtered) output and prices have moved in a counter-cyclical fashion, suggesting a dominance of shocks to aggregate supply affecting the Australian economy.

Macroeconomics --- Time-Series Models --- Dynamic Quantile Regressions --- Dynamic Treatment Effect Models --- Diffusion Processes --- State Space Models --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Price Level --- Inflation --- Deflation --- Economic growth --- Business cycles --- Prices --- Australia

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Growth and inflation in Turkey have been volatile over the last two decades. It would, therefore, be useful to identify indicators that anticipate economic conditions and inflation. This paper investigates the predictive performance of economic indicators for inflation and real output growth in Turkey. We find that (i) the forecasting ability of individual indicators is unstable; but that (ii) a suitable combination of these unstable forecasts yields a forecast that reliably outperforms that generated by an autoregressive model. We then propose a two-stage combination forecast obtained by taking the median of the top five performing individual forecasts. This two-stage forecast reliably improves on autoregressive benchmarks and outperforms the combination forecast based on all the individual forecasts.

Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Forecasting --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Forecasting and Simulation --- Central Banks and Their Policies --- Economic Growth of Open Economies --- Economywide Country Studies: Europe --- Forecasting and Other Model Applications --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Economic Forecasting --- Economic growth --- Consumer price indexes --- Asset prices --- Economic forecasting --- Cyclical indicators --- Prices --- Price indexes --- Business cycles --- Turkey

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In the context of the U.K. government’s EMU entry condition of cyclical convergence, this paper (i) provides further evidence suggesting that historically the U.K.’s business cycle has been more volatile than, and relatively independent of, the cycles in the euro-area countries; and (ii) identifies, using a small VAR model, a relatively significant role for monetary policy in explaining these differences. A simulation exercise suggests that if the U.K. interest rates had been more closely aligned with those in the euro area in the 1990s (as they would be if the United Kingdom were to join EMU), output growth might have been less volatile and more correlated with that in the euro area, but inflationary pressures might have persisted.

Foreign Exchange --- Inflation --- Macroeconomics --- Production and Operations Management --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: Forecasting and Simulation --- Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit: General --- International Economic Order and Integration --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- Price Level --- Deflation --- Macroeconomics: Production --- Economic growth --- Currency --- Foreign exchange --- Business cycles --- Exchange rates --- Real effective exchange rates --- Output gap --- Prices --- Production --- Economic theory --- United Kingdom

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Empirical evidence - including the current global crisis - suggests that shocks from advanced countries often have a disproportionate effect on developing economies. Can this account for the fact that aggregate fluctuations are larger and more persistent in the latter than in the former economies? And what are the mechanisms at play? This paper addresses these questions using a model of an industrial and a developing economy trading goods and assets, with (i) a product cycle shaping the range of intermediate goods used to produce new capital in each country, and (ii) investment adjustment costs in the developing economy. Innovation by the advanced economy results in new intermediate goods, at first produced at home, and eventually transferred to the developing economy through direct investment. The pace of innovation and technology transfer is driven by profitability. This process of technology diffusion creates a medium-term connection between both economies, over and above the short-term link through trade. Calibration of the model to match Mexico-United States trade and foreign direct investment flows shows that this mechanism can explain why shocks to the United States economy have a larger effect on Mexico than on the United States itself, and hence why Mexico shows higher volatility than the United States; why business cycles in the United States lead to medium-term fluctuations in Mexico; and why consumption is not less volatile than output in Mexico.

Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles --- Trade --- International Factor Movements and International Business --- Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance --- Innovation • Research and Development • Technological Change • Intellectual Property Rights

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We study the properties of a test that determines whether two time series comove. The test computes a simple nonparametric statistic for “concordance,” which describes the proportion of time that the cycles of two series spend in the same phase. We establish the size and power properties of this test. As an illustration, the procedures are applied to output series from selected major industrial countries. We find limited evidence of widespread concordance for these countries.

Macroeconomics --- Public Finance --- Semiparametric and Nonparametric Methods --- Business Fluctuations --- Cycles --- Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles: General (includes Measurement and Data) --- National Government Expenditures and Related Policies: General --- Economic growth --- Public finance & taxation --- Business cycles --- Public expenditure review --- Expenditure --- Expenditures, Public --- United States