Meta‐Analysis of Chinese Business Cycle Correlation

We review previous research on China's business cycle correlation with other economies applying meta‐analysis. We survey 71 papers analysing the different periods of Chinese economic development since the 1950s that were published in English or Chinese. We confirm that Pacific Rim economies in particular have relatively high business cycle correlation with China. It appears that many characteristics of the studies and authors influence the reported degree of business cycle synchronization. For instance, Chinese‐language papers report higher correlation coefficients. Despite this, we do not detect robust evidence for publication bias in the papers. Moreover, we show that the broad evidence does not confirm the popular decoupling hypothesis.     

Business Cycle Properties of the Legitimate and Underground Economy in Australia

The business cycle characteristics of the legitimate economy have been examined quite extensively. In this paper we extend the standard business cycle analysis to the underground economy and compare it to the legitimate economy. Using National Bureau of Economic Research dating methodologies we find that classical cycles exhibit strong incidence of asymmetry while growth cycles appear relatively symmetric. We find that changes in legitimate activity lead to changes in underground activity but that the underground economy responds more to negative shocks in legitimate activity than to positive shocks. This implies that the underground economy is deepening economic downturns and increasing the volatility of the business cycle in general.     

Business cycles synchronization in East Asia: A Markov-switching approach

This paper attempts to analyze the relationships between the ASEAN-5's business cycles. We examine the nature of business cycle synchronization trying to disentangle between intraregional and interregional synchronization by considering the important role of China, Japan and the US in synchronizing the activity within the ASEAN-5. We employ a time-varying transition probability Markov switching framework in order to allow the degree of synchronization to fluctuate across the phases of the business cycles. We provide evidence that the signals contained in some regional and global leading business cycles can impact the ASEAN-5's business cycles.     

The impact of Chinese monetary policy shocks on East and South‐East Asia1

We study the effects of Chinese monetary policy shocks on China's major trading partners in East and South‐East Asia by estimating structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models for six economies in the region. We find that a monetary expansion in Mainland China leads to an increase in real GDP (temporary) and the price level (permanent) in a number of economies in our sample, most notably in Hong Kong and the Philippines. The impact could result from intertemporal substitution present in a general equilibrium framework, which allows for positive domestic impacts of foreign monetary expansions. Our results emphasize the growing importance of China for its neighbouring economies and the significance of Chinese shocks for the design of monetary policy in Asian economies.     

经济周期协动性的影响因素分析——基于中国与其东亚贸易伙伴的实证研究

影响中国(大陆)与其贸易伙伴之间的经济周期协动性变化的因素主要包括双边贸易强度、产业内贸易、外国直接投资、金融开放度、产业结构相似度、财政政策协调、货币政策协调、汇率政策等。运用混合最小二乘法对1992-2009年中国(大陆)及其贸易伙伴共14个国家和地区的面板数据进行实证分析,结果显示:中国与其他亚洲经济体的协动性主要受到产业内贸易强度和产业结构相似度这两个因素的影响。因此,政府应该有针对性地调整相关政策以更好地应对外部冲击。     

Business Cycle Synchronization in EU: A Time‐Varying Approach

This article investigates the time‐varying correlation between the EU12‐wide business cycle and the initial EU12 member‐countries based on Scalar‐BEKK and multivariate Riskmetrics model frameworks for the period 1980–2012. The paper provides evidence that changes in the business cycle synchronization correspond to major economic events that have taken place at a European level. In the main, business cycle synchronization until 2007 had moved in a direction positive for the operation of a single currency, suggesting that the common monetary policy was less costly in terms of lost flexibility at the national level. However, as a result of the Great Recession of 2007 and the subsequent Eurozone Crisis, a number of periphery countries, most notably Greece, have experienced desynchronization of their business cycles with the EU12‐wide cycle. Nevertheless, for most countries, any questions regarding the optimality and sustainability of the common currency area in Europe should not be attributed to a lack of cyclical synchronization.     

FDI流量变化与世界经济周期的相关性分析

经济周期影响一切经济活动，以跨国公司为主体的FDI也必然受经济周期的影响。本文以实证方式利用世界FDI和世界GDP增长率的历史数据分析了FDI与经济周期的相关性，并作了相应解释。     

Determinants of International Research Collaboration: Evidence from International Co‐Inventions in Asia and Major OECD Countries

International research collaboration has become important in recent years. This paper analyzes what gains drive the expansion of international research collaboration and what costs prevent it, with a special focus on the incidence of international co‐inventions (ICIs) in Asia and major Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development countries. The major findings are as follows. ICIs become more prevalent in those technology sectors where scientific literature becomes important as prior art, inventor team size increases, and the relative inventor resources of the own country in the world declines. Thus, ICIs allow a country to exploit more efficiently the world stock of new knowledge and to realize the gains from combining diverse sources of knowledge and skills. Moreover, the results of estimating a gravity model centered on the USA and Great Britain suggest that language differences measured by Test of English as a Foreign Language scores matter significantly. The results also suggest that exporting from these two countries are significantly and positively associated with ICIs.     

Business Cycle Synchronization between Euro Area and Central and Eastern European Countries

We analyze the degree of co‐movements in real macroeconomic aggregates across selected euro area and Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries applying a multi‐factor model. Our results suggest that the evolution of the global European factor matches well the narrative of main economic events between 1995 and 2011, capturing among others the recession during the recent global financial and economic crisis. This factor plays a central role in explaining real output growth variability in euro area and is negligible in CEE countries. Furthermore, using Markov switching models and concordance indices, we shed light on an increase in business cycle synchronization, with the degree of concordance between country‐specific and European business cycles being high.     

Business Cycle Synchronization in the Proposed East African Monetary Union: An Unobserved Component Approach

This paper uses the business cycle synchronization criteria of the theory of optimum currency area (OCA) to examine the feasibility of the East African Community (EAC) as a monetary union. We also investigate whether the degree of business cycle synchronization has increased after the 1999 EAC Treaty. We use an unobserved component model to measure business cycle synchronization as the proportion of structural shocks that are common across different countries, and a time‐varying parameter model to examine the dynamics of synchronization over time. We find that although the degree of synchronization has increased since 2000 when the EAC Treaty came into force, the proportion of shocks that is common across different countries is still small implying weak synchronization. This evidence casts doubt on the feasibility of a monetary union for the EAC as scheduled by 2012.     

Inventories and the Business Cycle*

This paper examines the relationship between the inventory cy and the business cycle using both macroeconomic and survey da It is argued that over the past decade and a half, the changes inventory management have reduced the amplitude of the inventc cycle. The paper also argues that the behaviour of inventories consistent with demand shocks being an important source of business cycle fluctuations.     

Foreign Aid and the Business Cycle

This paper documents empirical regularities in the foreign aid flows to developing countries over three decades. In spite of a large body of literature on foreign aid and its impact on recipients, surprisingly little is known about its business cycle characteristics. The authors show that for the vast majority of African recipients, aid flows are a major source of income that is highly volatile and, most importantly, overwhelmingly procyclical. For recipients outside of Africa, there is a similar—if somewhat less pronounced—pattern of aid procyclicality. In contrast, there is little evidence of aid procyclicality with the business cycle of donors. In light of the very high volatility of output in developing countries, the procyclicality of foreign aid flows from the recipients' perspective raises serious questions related to their welfare and growth.     

International Trade and the Business Cycle

This paper develops a new empirical framework for analysing the dynamics of the trade balance in response to different types of macroeconomic shocks. The model provides a synthetic perspective on the conditional correlations between the business cycle and the trade balance that are generated by different shocks and attempts to reconcile these results with unconditional correlations found in the data. The results suggest that, in the post-Bretton Woods period, nominal shocks have been an important determinant of the forecast error variance for fluctuations in the trade balance in G-7 countries.     

我国财政政策作用机制与经济周期波动的相关性研究

我国积极财政政策在总需求管理过程中起到了重要作用.通过判断我国财政政策工具和财政政策规模与经济周期波动之间的关联,描述结构VAR模型中财政政策的作用和反馈过程,我们发现我国积极财政政策操作过程中体现出了一定程度的相机选择性和对经济周期阶段的依赖性,这意味着在我国经济增长已经出现"软扩张"的经济周期态势下,应当适当调整财政政策的期限结构和政策工具,加强货币政策的组合作用,继续保持积极财政政策对国内产出的作用方向.     

城乡居民生活水平差距的变化——基于经济周期视角分析

为探究周期性波动因素如何影响中国城乡居民生活水平差距变化,本文对新凯恩斯模型进行以下拓展:城乡二元经济体系,城乡居民不同金融参与程度,及城乡间劳力迁移。基于1996—2012年季度数据,由贝斯估计得到的本文模型可以很好地匹配主要宏观变量的数据特性。本文研究得到各种外生冲击对城乡居民收入与消费周期性变动的动态影响及解释力大小;并探明城乡生活水平周期性差距在2002—2004年间扩大及2011年之后减缓的影响主因;同时也发现短期宏观政策对城乡生活水平周期性差距具有不对称影响。     

Economic growth and unemployment in East Asia

Barro and Sala-i-Martin （2004） analyzed the empirical determinants of growth. The data used in this paper consists of panel data of several macroeconomic variables observed for 55 years 0950-2004） in six East Asian countries and regions. Following the implications of semi-endogenous growth theory, the author regressed output growth on the determinants of steady-state income. The estimation and test results suggest the existence of significant relationship between steady-state income and （trend weighted） R ＆ D input both in Japan and South Korea. In addition, following Cellini （1995）, the author also considers cointegration and error-correction methods as the growth regression of East Asian countries. Meanwhile, Chang, et al （2004） derived the conclusion that the decreases in reallocation shocks are main factor in a downward trend in natural rate of unemployment for South Korea. The author extends this analysis using structural VAR to other Asian countries and regions, Japan and Taiwan region. Impulse responses show that the growth of production in Korea and Taiwan reduce unemployment, but, in Japan, this raises unemployment.     

Real and Financial Integration in East Asia

This paper examines the real and financial integration of East Asian economies, by comparing the degree of real vs financial and global vs regional integration, before vs after the Asian crisis. First, price and quantity measures such as the size of intra‐ and inter‐regional trade, cross‐border financial assets, stock return correlation, and interest rate differentials are investigated. Second, the structural panel vector autoregression (VAR) model is constructed to analyze macroeconomic consequences of real and financial integration such as cross‐country output and consumption relation. The results suggest that (i) the degree of real integration significantly increased after the crisis, both regionally and globally; (iii) quantity and price measures showed an increased financial integration after the crisis, but the consumption relation did not; (iv) the degree of regional financial integration is smaller than that of global financial integration, based on the consumption relation; and (v) financial integration lags real integration, especially for regional integration.