A Coincident Indicator of the Gulf Cooperation Council Business Cycle
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Abdullah Mohammed Alhassan
This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle over the last decade, where the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together. Since the indicator is constructed using a small number of common factors, the strong correlation between the indicator and real GDP growth points to a high degree of commonality across GCC economies. The timing and direction of movements in macroeconomic variables are characterized with respect to the coincident indicator. Finally, to obtain a meaningful economic interpretation of the latent factors, their behavior is compared to the observed economic variables.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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- A Coincident Indicator of the Gulf Cooperation Council Business Cycle
- Fiscal Policy and Growth in Saudi Arabia
- Markov Switching and State-Space Approaches for Investigating the Link between Egyptian Inflation Level and Uncertainty
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Articles in the same Issue
- Article
- A Coincident Indicator of the Gulf Cooperation Council Business Cycle
- Fiscal Policy and Growth in Saudi Arabia
- Markov Switching and State-Space Approaches for Investigating the Link between Egyptian Inflation Level and Uncertainty
- The Trade-Growth Relationship in Israel Revisited: Evidence from Annual Data, 1960-2004
