Page - 112 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

112 Due to these difficulties, only results based on BK-filtered data are analysed more closely in the following. The short leading property of the euro area business cycle (excluding Germany and Austria) for averages, as shown in Table A 3 c (for medians only coinci- dence can be observed), is confirmed by cross-correlation and mean delay according to Table A 1 c. Looking at euro area GDP including both countries (which introduces a bias), both tables in- dicate a shift towards a more coincident behaviour. A different picture is presented for the German economy. Whereas Ta- ble A 1 c suggests a coincident behaviour of the German business cycle, represented by the series gerGVAex, with respect to the Austrian cycle, the turning point analysis in Table A 3 c indicates for averages and means a leading behaviour. In order to obtain a clearer picture of the German business cycle properties, the be- haviour of German GDP has been observed. But looking at this se- ries, differences become even more pronounced. Cross-correla- tion and mean delay statistics suggest a lag of German GDP with respect to autGV Aex, while peaks and troughs are leading on av- erage and for medians. Even the search for a possible change of the pattern over time was not successful. According to Table A 2, turning point dates for the first half of the series give no systemati- cally different picture than for the second half. Therefore this ques- tion remains unresolved for the case of an ad-hoc definition of the business cycle. The dates identified allow further the measuring of the length of cycles and phases of all series. This can be done either by simply dividing the total time span of the series of approximately 30 years by the number of cycles. For the cyclical variations included in the Austrian reference series autGVAex, this gives for seven cycles an average length of around four years for one complete business cycle. For a closer observation, Tables A 4 a to c show the aver- age duration of cycles and phases, with cycles defined as the time span between two successive turning points with the same sign (two peaks or two troughs) and phases as the time span be- tween different turning points (from peak to trough or trough to peak). Thus, two successive phases give a complete cycle. In or-