THE POST‐WAR INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CYCLE Available to Purchase

This paper seeks to establish the existence of an international business cycle during the postwar period through a variety of statistical techniques. It also isolates some of the features of this cycle: for example, the differing levels of synchronization between different countries and the changes in these levels over time. One conclusion is that future work on the international cycle must focus on the observed simultaneity between the U.S., Japan and Germany. Another surprising conclusion, given the theoretical consequences of increased integration, is that there is no evidence of a tendency towards greater synchronization over the period.