Dynamics of Business Cycles in Vietnam: A comparison with Indonesia and Philippines

Abstract: The objective of this paper is to analyze the dynamics of business cycle features and investigate the main source of macroeconomic fluctuations in Vietnam, and then make comparison to Indonesia and the Philippines. In the first task, the business cycle features are evaluated by properties of data, including volatility, persistence and co-movement after taking Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter in 2 periods: before and after the global financial crisis in 2008. Results indicate that these properties mostly concentrate on second period (2008-2013) in Vietnam, whereas the Asian Financial Crisis leads to a high volatility and persistence in Philippines and Indonesia. In order to identify the sources of macroeconomic fluctuations, the study adopts the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) with data covered from 1996 to 2013. The evidence for countries suggests that (i) the main source of output variance is domestic supply shocks but there is a significant decrease in long-run; (ii) The fluctuations of trade balance are mostly due to external shocks, especially term of trade shocks in Vietnam, as opposed to Philippines and Indonesia where IS shocks play an important role; (iii) The fluctuations of real exchange rate are mainly driven by the domestic shocks but internal causes of each country are different; (iv) the most two important sources of price’s movements are domestic shocks, especially IS and nominal shocks in Vietnam.