Are Business and Credit Cycles Converging or Diverging? A comparison of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Euro Area.

This paper provides an analysis of co-movements between real and financial variables in three new EU member countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and the euro area. It focuses on the co-movement between real credit granted to firms and real industrial output on the one hand, and between the aforementioned variables and a monetary policy indicator (the three-month real interest rate) on the other. Given that there is no single definition for the business cycle, we take three different approaches: we identify the turning points in the series and then estimate a concordance index; we decompose and compare the cyclical components of the series; and we calculate dynamic correlations across the variables. We find a better convergence of real than financial cycles between the new EU members and the euro area. There is no a high degree of dependence between loans and industrial output in all countries; yet, monetary policy appears to smooth the distribution of credit throughout the cycles.Co-movements ; Turning points ; Spectral analysis ; Credit cycle ; Business cycle ; New EU member states.

L’évolution des crédits à l’habitat en France : une grille d’analyse en termes de cycles

This article puts forward a framework based primarily on probabilistic tools to analyse the nature of housing loan cycles in France. The continued high growth rate of housing loans may indeed raise concerns as to the duration and determinants of the cycle which currently prevails. The results obtained suggest that the current cycle is actually exceptional in many respects. One the one hand, it is the longest housing loans cycle observed over the last thirty years, while its occurrence appears to be structurally decoupled with several indicators of the real economy. On the other hand, this cycle may also be related to the existence of an excess supply regime, which could prove an important explanatory factor of a decoupling with the real economy.Credit cycle ; Band-pass filters ; Markov Switching, Disequilibrium.

Analyse des cycles réels, du crédit et de taux d’intérêt : Pologne, Hongrie, République tchèque et zone euro.

Co-mouvement, cycle, crédit, taux d’intérêt, production industrielle, nouveaux pays membres de l’UE.