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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between trade integration and intra-regional business cycle synchronization using value-added trade data. Most empirical studies analyzing the relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization use gross trade data which suffer from double-counting. Double-counting distorts the empirical results on the estimated relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization. This paper explores the relationship using value-added trade data to be free from distortions caused by double-counting.

Gross trade data on exports and imports are decomposed into sub-categories following Koopman et al. (2014). Then, value-added data on exports and imports without double-counted terms are built to measure value-added bilateral trade intensity and value-added intra-industry trade intensity. Using this value-added trade intensities, the author run panel regressions for Europe and East Asian countries to examine how value-added trade intensities are correlated with output co-movements.

The paper finds that for European countries, the positive association between trade and business cycle co-movements is more evidently observed and the role of intra-industry trade increasing the business cycle synchronization is also more clearly revealed by value-added trade data. On the other hand, for East Asian countries, value-added trade data reveal that it is very uncertain whether increased trade contributes to stronger synchronization of business cycles and intra-industry trade is truly the major factor which deepens the business cycle co-movements.

First, the paper examines the relationship only by running static panel regression. There is a need to employ different methodologies such as instrumental variable regression or dynamic panel regression. Second, financial integration and policy coordination within a region are also other relevant factors which influence the intra-regional business cycle synchronization. There is a need to examine the relationship using value-added trade data with the variables measuring the degree of financial integration and policy coordination. Third, value-added trade data used in this paper has limited coverage of East Asian countries. There is also a need to extend the value-added data set to cover more countries and industries.

Most empirical literature studying the relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization rely on gross trade data. This paper would be the first attempt to study the relationship using value-added trade data. Duval et al. (2014) also use value-added data, but their value-added data are not supported by a solid accounting framework which decomposes a country’s gross exports into various value-added components by source and additional double-counted terms. Value-added data in this paper computed based on Koopman et al. (2014) are the total domestic value exports that are ultimately consumed abroad via final and intermediate exports. The author believes that value-added data in this paper are most relevant in estimating the relationship between trade integration and business cycle synchronization.

This paper aims to assess the feasibility of the proposed Caribbean Monetary Union (CMU) by examining the synchronization of business cycles within CARICOM. According to the literature on optimum currencies, the synchronization of business cycles is a key requirement for the formation of a monetary union.

In order to extract the business cycles we use the Hodrick‐Prescott (HP) filter and the band pass (BP) filter. For the purposes of measuring synchronization two concepts are used: the simple correlation coefficient and the Concordance statistic of Pagan and Harding. First, the feasibility of enlarging the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union is examined and then consideration is given to the formation of a new monetary union with Trinidad and Tobago as the center.

The paper finds the degree of business cycle synchronization to be weak. This casts doubt on the feasibility of the proposed CMU.

This paper has placed emphasis on the synchronization of business cycles. While the synchronization of business cycles is necessary, is not sufficient for a successful monetary union. Other factors such as political cohesion may be just as important.

This paper's main contribution is that it employs a more rigorous framework and a more comprehensive data set than previous studies.

To the best of our knowledge, no study has examined credit cycle synchronizations in the context of emerging economies. Studying the credit cycles synchronization across BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries is crucial given the magnitude of trade and financial integration among member counties. The enormity of the trade and financial linkages among BRICS countries and growth spillovers from emerging economies to advanced and low-income countries provide the rationale and motivation to study the synchronization of credit cycles across BRICS.

The study investigates the credit cycles coherence across BRICS economies from 1996Q2 to 2020Q4. The synchronization analysis is done using the noval wavelet approach. The analysis examines not only the coherence but also the extent of credit cycle synchronization that varies across frequencies and over time among different pairs of nations.

The authors find heterogeneity in the credit cycles' synchronization among the member nations. China and India are very much in sync with the other BRICS countries. China's high-frequency credit cycle mostly leads the other countries' credit cycles before the global financial crisis and shows a mix of lead/lag relationships post-financial crisis. Interestingly, most of the time, India's low-frequency credit cycles lead the member countries' credit cycles, and Brazil's low frequency credit cycle lag behind the other BRICS countries' credit cycles, except for Russia. The results are crucial from the macroprudential policymaker's perspective.

The empirical design is applicable to a similar set of countries and may not directly fit each emerging economy.

The findings will help understand the marked deepening of trade, technology, investment and financial interdependence across the world. BRICS acronym requires no introduction, but such analysis may help understand the interaction at the monetary policy level.

This is the first study that highlights the need to understand the credit variable interactions for BRICS nations.

This article offers a review of the literature on regional business cycles (BCs) in emerging economies. The objective is synthesizing the existing studies based on theoretical, empirical and methodological approaches.

The methodological framework includes the following stages: research questions, bibliography location, the selection of articles and the evaluation of the literature, analysis and synthesis, and the reporting and use of results.

The evidence suggests that expansionary phases last longer than recessions'; public expenditure shows a pro-cyclical behavior; and factors such as productive structure and international trade explain the synchronization of regional BCs.

Up until now, there is no research that performs a review of regional BCs in emerging economics.

The purpose of this paper is to study synchronization in stock index cycles across 82 countries and the linkage between macroeconomic and financial integration and stock market synchronization.

The author document the synchronization structure of the world equity index cycles and its evolution over time. The author examine the explanatory power of various economic and financial variables on cycle comovements.

Trade openness, capital openness, and an EU membership contribute to higher stock index cycle synchronization. Additionally, the macroeconomic and financial variables have asymmetric impacts on countries of different development levels.

The author is the first to thoroughly chronicle the turning points, i.e., bear and bull regimes, of world equity indexes and empirically examine determinants of their cyclical comovement across nations.

The literature mostly investigates the impact of trade and financial integration on business cycle synchronization. The author differs by focusing on the real effective exchange rate as the target variable in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) region. In particular, the author investigates synchronization by analyzing the short- and long-run dynamics of the real effective exchange rates of Canada, Mexico and the US for 2008–2019.

The author first employs stationarity and cointegration tests to specify and estimate the long-run equilibrium relation between the real effective exchange rates of Canada, Mexico and the US. The author then specifies and estimates an error-correction model for each real effective exchange rate in order to investigate whether the adjustment in eliminating disequilibrium is asymmetric.

The results indicate that the real effective exchange rates of Canada, Mexico and the US are cointegrated with only one long-run equilibrium relation. Canada's real effective exchange rate responds symmetrically to eliminate both negative and positive disequilibrium with a similar speed of adjustment. However, the response of Mexico's real effective exchange rate is asymmetric, as it responds to eliminate only positive disequilibrium. The US real effective exchange rate does not respond to disequilibrium, perhaps because it has a large economy with much stronger competition beyond the NAFTA region than both Canada and Mexico.

This is the first study that investigates real effective exchange rate synchronization in the NAFTA region.

The purpose of this paper is to provide perspective on whether and why global metro house prices have become more synchronized, and perspective on the limited implications of this for investing in international real estate.

This paper reviews main findings from the literature on house price determination, reviews the emerging literature on global synchronization, and provides graphs to illustrate main points and trends.

House prices have become somewhat more synchronized likely reflecting greater correlation in long-term interest rates and macroeconomic cycles related to trends in globalization and international portfolio diversification. Nevertheless, this trend has not been continuous, reflecting that house prices depend on other fundamentals, which are not uniform across areas. Theory and evidence indicate that the more common are fundamentals, the more synchronized are house price cycles and the more substitution effects may matter. Also, real estate markets that are open to immigration and foreign investment have become more sensitive to shifts in the international demand for property by migrants or investors.

Changes in international house price synchronization stem from variation in two categories of key drivers of house prices. The first are traditional supply and demand fundamentals. The second include international capital flows and immigration. Both sets of factors are sensitive to the economic environment and public policy. Increased synchronization of business cycles, the Euro currency union, and more common monetary policy strategies and tactics have fostered greater correlation of real interest rates across countries, which tend to increase house price synchronization. These effects can be amplified by the tendency for property owners to use extrapolative expectations of future house prices.

Shifts in prospective returns and the synchronization of international property returns not only on arbitrage of general property price differentials but also on underlying factors driving those differentials. Investors need to be mindful of the risks that metro prices sometimes reflect bubble-builder dynamics that can give rise to over-shooting of house prices. Observing simple correlations and changes in those correlations does not do away with the need for careful analysis of property investment, and if anything, warrant analysis of both how and why one may observe changes in the extent to which international house prices is synchronized.

Despite the rise of globalization and of new technologies, the author has seen substantial divergences in house prices emerge across gateway cities and metros in less vibrant areas within countries. These reflect not only the impact of stronger income and population in more tech, educated and global oriented cities but also changes in the demand for amenities toward more culturally appealing cities, often – but not exclusively in – warmer or coastal areas where the supply elasticity of housing is often limited. Further complicating investment decisions are potential shifts in housing or immigration policy that can notably affect the demand for housing.

The paper provides practical perspective on why different groups of international cities have seen their house prices become more sychronized. Nevertheless, increased synchronization has occurred within an elite set of major cities, but in an environment house prices have diverged across gateway cities and metros in less vibrant areas within countries. The paper helps investors make sense of some recent patterns and recent prospects for investing in international real estate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the proposed eco currency union has sufficient business cycle synchronization among its members to avoid problems such as those experienced in the last several years by countries in the eurozone. This monetary union would potentially include 18 countries – Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo – which collectively have a GDP of over 744 billion dollars and a population of over 300 million people.

The authors will apply some recently created econometric tools that were developed specifically to investigate business cycle synchronization in the eurozone. These tools – denoted synchronicity and similarity – overcome some of the limitations of previous studies which have used vector autoregressions and suffered simultaneity bias as a result.

The different measures employed suggest that the potential members of the eco exhibit a very low level of synchronization. Nigeria in particular, which is heavily dependent on oil, as are some, but not all potential members, would be the largest member, and exhibits a very low level of synchronization with other prospective eco member nations. Finally, preliminary evidence from several countries which have joined the existing African currency unions does not indicate that the act of joining a currency union improves synchronization, and this result contradicts the “endogenous optimal currency area” hypothesis.

Like previous studies on the topic, the authors rely on the available data. The number of observations is more limited than would be optimal.

The results would strongly caution against the creation of the eco currency union, as members appear even less ready for monetary integration than countries in the eurozone did.

This is the first study to apply the synchronicity and similarity tools to the prospective West African eco nations.

The objective of the paper is to explore the out-of-sample forecasting connections in income growth across the globe.

An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework is employed and the forecasting performance is analyzed across several horizons using different forecast combination techniques.

Results show that the foreign country's income provides superior forecasts beyond what is provided by the country's own past income movements. Superior forecasting power is particularly held by Belgium, Korea, New Zealand, the UK and the US, while these countries' income is rather difficult to predict by global counterparts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, improved forecasts of income can be obtained even for longer horizons using our approach. Results also show that the forecast combination techniques yield higher forecasting gains relative to individual model forecasts, both in magnitude and the number of countries.

The forecasting paths of income movement across the globe reveal that predictive power greatly differs across countries, regions and forecast horizons. The countries that are difficult to predict in the short run are often seen to be predictable by global income movements in the long run.

Even while it is difficult to predict the income movements at an individual country level, combining information from the income growth of several countries is likely to provide superior forecasting gains. And these gains are higher for long-horizon forecasts as compared to the short-horizon forecast.

In evaluating the forward-looking social implications of economic policy changes, the policymakers should also consider the possible global forecasting connections revealed in the study.

Employing an ARDL model to explore global income forecasting connections across several forecast horizons using different forecast combination techniques.

This paper aims to focus on the banking crises recorded in Italy in the period 1861-2016 and to propose a novel classification based upon the timing of the crisis with respect to the business cycle.

A simple and objective rule to distinguish between slowdown and inner-banking crises is introduced. The real impact of banking crises is evaluated by integrating the narrative approach with an empirical vector autoregression analysis.

First, banking crises are not always associated to economic downturns. Especially in Italy, (but this analysis can be easily extended to other countries), they have often limited their negative effects within the financial system (“inner” crises). Second, the simultaneity of macroeconomic effects (credit contraction and GDP recession) leave the causal link undetermined. Third, the empirical and narrative analyses performed testify that boom–bust mechanisms are an exception in the panorama of (Italian) banking crises; although when the economy experiences such episodes, the economic and social consequences are not only severe but also enduring.

To classify historically recognized banking crisis episodes, the authors look at credit and GDP dynamics (and their ratio) around crisis years. Relying on a single definition of crisis is avoided. The classification provides an empirical rule to determine in what way banking crises differ. The classification is mostly based on the synchronization with the business cycle and, using the documented evolution of macroeconomic aggregates, it permits to highlight the fact that a variety of interactions occur between financial and real aggregates during and around banking crises.

As to the concept of systemic banking crisis, a qualitative judgment is often adopted to select relevant episodes, thus confirming the absence of a quantitative rule in classification criteria (Chaudron and de Haan, 2014). This paper proposes a simple and objective rule to distinguish between slowdown and inner-banking crises; the former occur close to a GDP contraction, whereas the latter appear to spread their effects with no substantial evidence of output loss.