Seite - 136 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

136 downturns (from a peak to a trough) for autCDE of somewhat be- low 8 quarters, which corresponds some what with the 17 months reported in Artis - Marcellino - Proietti (2004). This result is robust if we look at the common component only reflected in this series, which shows an average duration of 7½ quarters. For Germany and the euro area, the results are difficult to compare, as our study focuses only on gross value added excluding agriculture and forestry or GDP, respectively. Nevertheless, in the case of our just BK-filtered data, both the results for Germany and the euro area show a duration of around 8 quarters and of 20 and 23 months in the study by Artis -Marcellino -Proietti (2004) which cor- responds quite well. The business cycle represented by the com- mon component in the German GV Aex shows a duration of 7½ quarters for recessions, which is somewhat longer than the 20 months reported in the reference study. For that approach, no euro area data including Austria and Germany have been used in order to avoid a bias, thereby inhibiting a comparison. Artis - Marcellino -Proietti (2004) also calculated cross-correlations between countries, but only for coincident behaviour ( at zero leads or lags) which can be compared with our study. Tables A 1 a to c show the cross-correlations calculated in our study, which show that at zero lags BK-filtered euro area GDP (including Ger- many and Austria) is 0.73 and for German gross value added ex- cluding agriculture and forestry 0.72 compared with the Austrian reference series. This is somewhat lower than the values presented in Artis - Marcellino - Proietti (2004), who calculated for their HP band-pass deviation cycles 0.84 and 0.75, respectively, but con- centrated on industrial production only120, for which a higher co- movement seems plausible. 120 Artis - Marcellino - Proietti (2004) further calculated a so-called concordance indicator as proposed by Harding - Pagan (2003) which measures the fraction of time when two time series are in the same state (expansion or contraction). Inter- estingly, they found that this concordance between the Austrian and German in- dustrial production is small and insignificant, whereas it is large and significant compared with the euro area. This can be interpreted such that Austrian industrial