Seite - 7 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

7 2. The data In order to study business cycles on a sectoral basis, only national accounts data broken down by sectors are used here. This is not at odds with the definition of Burns - Mitchel ( 1946) requiring the use of several time series of different origin for business cycle analysis. According to Harding - Pagan (2002), this requirement by Burns - Mitchel ( 1946) was due to a historical lack of economic data at frequency lower than a year, rather than a methodologi- cal condition. The following quarterly time series are considered: • Real13 GDP as the most comprehensive measure of produc- tion. This aggregate has been used in many studies on busi- ness cycles. • Real gross value added (GVA) which is defined as GDP minus taxes on production (like VAT and excise duties) plus subsidies on production (mainly granted for agricultural production) 14• This aggregate should exhibit stronger cyclical variations than GDP as production taxes and subsidies are empirically not necessarily related to production 1s. • Real gross value added excluding agriculture and forestry (GVAex for short) should show cyclical variations even more clearly than real gross value added and GDP. This is because agriculture and forestry are less driven by business cycle de- 13 In this study, the word "real" refers to chained values with the year 2000 as the reference year. 14 For time series of older vintage, GVA does not include indirectly measured finan- cial intermediation services (FISIM), which is discussed below. 15 This does not mean that they develop smoothly. But even if their infra-annual variability is higher than that of GDP, it is to be expected that this lies in part outside the business cycle frequency spectrum.