Measuring the Sources of Cyclical Fluctuations in the G7 Economies.

We analyze herein the importance of four types of shocks in contributing to the business cycles of the G7 economies. After disentangling the common permanent and transitory shocks in the G7 outputs, we identify the domestic and foreign components of such shocks for each country. This provides us with quite a flexible palette for understanding the degree of openness of the G7 countries, useful information for the analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of each national economy. Our empirical analysis reveals that the cycles of most of the G7 outputs are dominated by their domestic components and that the foreign components are almost entirely due to permanent shocks.