Page - 110 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

110 HP-filtered series. Again, this could be a hint to the difficulties aris- ing when using time series which carry high- frequency variations. In view of these deficiencies of first-order-differenced and HP- filtered data, the analysis of turning point sequences concentrates in the following on BK-filtered ones only. Table A 3 c shows aver- age and mean leads and lags for all peaks and troughs. Euro area GDP (excluding Germany and Austria) leads the Austrian refer- ence cycle by half a quarter on average. This goes for peaks as well as for troughs. Looking at the median shift suggests that the euro area business cycle is coincident with the Austrian cycle, with half a quarter lag for peaks and half a quarter lead for troughs. The German business cycle - represented by the turning points found in gross value added excluding agriculture and forestry - shows a somewhat stronger lead vis-a-vis the Austrian cycle than euro area GDP' 12• Over all turning points, there exists a lead of 1.08 quarters, which is with 1.17 quarters insignificantly higher for troughs than for peaks 1 .00. This result is broadly reflected by the median statistic which notes for peaks and troughs a lead of 0.5 quarters. In line with theoretical considerations, all series representing indus- trial production (autCDE and gerCDE) lead the Austrian cycle, whereas German industrial production leads for peaks as well as for troughs by 0.83 quarters on average, or half a quarter in the median case. For Austrian industrial production, this lead is with 0.43 quarters in the case of averages and 0.5 for medians some- what shorter. On average, Austrian GDP lags the cycle for peaks by approximately half a quarter, whereas it leads the cycle for troughs by the same amount of time. This yields for all turning points roughly a coincident behaviour, which is reflected by the median statistic, too. 112 This implies - without prejudice to causality - that the German cycle leads the European one.