Changes in International Business Cycle Affiliations

We investigate changes in international business cycle affiliations using an iterative procedure for detecting system-wide structural breaks. We analyze GDP growth rates in two systems, one with the US, Euro-area, UK and Canada and the other for the Euro-area countries of France, Germany and Italy. We discover that international dynamic interactions change in both the mid-1980s and early 1990s, with such changes being particularly important for studying influences on the aggregate Euro-area. However, contemporaneous (conditional) correlations between these Euro-area countries increase in 1984 and 1998, with a large increase in correlations also evident across the international system during the 1990s.