Page - 146 - in The Austrian Business Cycle in the European Context

146 last cycle matches very well with our findings. The trough in 1993 can be found in nearly all of our time series, and it is well docu- mented by many other studies. According to Artis - Krolzig - Toro (2004), the last cycle ends with a peak in the middle of 1994. Apart from our badly performing fist-order- differenced series, the Bry- Boschan routine used in our study tends to date it later, at the end of 1994. 9 .12 Comparing the results with the dating calendar of the CEPR As there is no official dating of business cycle turning points for the euro area, like the one carried out by the National Bureau of Eco- nomic Research (NBER) for th~ US, the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) has formed an eight-member committee to set dates for the euro area. This committee has set up a chronology of recessions and expansions for the 11 original euro area member countries from 1970 to 1998 and for the current euro area as a whole since 1999. It has chosen a definition of the business cycle similar to the NBER, but some adaptations have been made. It defines" ... a recession as a significant decline in the level of economic activity, spread across the economy of the euro area, usually visible in two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP, employment and other measures of aggregate economic activity for the euro area as a whole, and reflecting similar developments in most countries. A recession begins just after the economy reaches a peak of activity and ends when the economy reaches its trough. Between trough and peak, the economy is formally in an expan- sion: between peak and trough it is in a recession. In both cases, growth rates may be low124." Whereas this definition explains the nature of troughs, it provides no rule for the detection of peaks. 124 See CEPR (2003).