Macroeconomic integration in Asia Pacific: common stochastic trends and business cycle coherence

This paper addresses the question of macroeconomic integration in the Asian Pacific region. Economically, the analysis is based on the notions of stochastic long-run convergence and business cycle coherence. The econometric procedure consists of tests for cointegration, the examination of vector error correction models, several variants of common cycle tests and forecast error variance decompositions. Results in favour of cyclical synchrony can be partly established, and are even exceeded by the broad evidence for equilibrium relations. In these domains, several leading countries are identified.