Page - 4 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

4 nisms, could guide economic policy by suggesting branch-specific measures, although these could be difficult to implement. The present study intends not only to date the Austrian business cycle, but also to give information about the leading and lagging properties for several economic branches. Furthermore, their inter- relation with corresponding sectors for Germany and to the euro area as a whole will be analysed. This may give insight into the transmission mechanisms from the international business cycle to the Austrian economy. In order to check the robustness of results, several procedures for isolating and analysing the business cycle will be applied that have become popular in recent time. Addi- tionally, the results of dating the Austrian business cycle are com- pared with earlier studies8• Several contributions have recently been published which focus on the correlation between business cycles in different countries, but there is a lack of recent studies for Austria9 due to its small economic weight. Such analysis has been carried out for GDP as a whole10 or for industrial production only, but not for different Austrian branches11• The focus of this study is on detecting business cycle comove- ments between countries on a branch level and dating the re- spective turning points. A timely identification of turning points at a Breuss ( 1984) and Hahn - Walterskirchen ( 1992) carried out the last thorough in- vestigations of business cycles for Austria. Brandner - Neusser ( 1992) and Cheung - Westermann ( 1999) investigated into the impact of the German business cycle on the Austrian industrial production. 9 Exceptions are the rather new studies of Vijselaar -Albers (2001) and Artis -Krol- zig - Toro (2004) where only industrial production is used for determining the Aus- trian business cycle. 10 According to Harding -Pagan (2002), the use of many series in the approach of Burns - Mitchell (1946) in order to gain a synthetic indicator of the business cycle only indicates, that " ... these were surrogates for a single series, GDP, as that was unavailable to them". 11 ROnstler (1994) is an example for a sectoral study of the Austrian economy, but focuses more on the long-run impact of foreign shocks.