Business Cycle Affiliations in the Context of European Integration

We study affiliations for the countries of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with Germany and the US, using various business cycle measures derived from quarterly real GDP. These measures are Hodrick-Prescott and Baxter-King filtered series, together with annual and quarterly growth rates. Using rolling contemporaneous and maximum (over a short lead/lag interval) correlations, we document increasing correlations of EMU countries with Germany, with these typically being largest during the 1990s. We also document a strong leading role for the US in relation to these countries in the period since 1993, thereby correcting the fallacy that the European business cycle was disjoint from the US for most of the 1990s.