Clusterization, Persistence, Dependency and Volatility of Business Cycles in an Enlarged Euro Area

The aim of this study is to estimate the degree of synchronization between the business cycles of the the most integrated seven CEE economies with the Euro Area, according to methods which are less used in the economic literature, some of them being proposed by Darvas and Szapáry (2004). In this study we have identified the main causes of the divergences between the business cycles in an enlarged Euro Area, using different methods such as cluster analysis, OLS regression, the 1st order autocorrelation coefficient, the SVAR decomposition and the standard deviation. Applying this analysis to all the seven CEE economies, it results in higher costs of the euro adoption in the case of Bulgaria and Romania and lower costs for Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland, respectively.