International and intranational business cycles

This paper surveys and analyses the international real business cycle literature. We re-explore two international business cycle anomalies emphasized by Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1995) as well as establishing the pattern of productivity growth between industries and countries. We then compare these findings for the international business cycle to those obtained for data between regions within a country-the so-called 'intranational business cycle'. Importantly, the intranational business cycle is a natural environment for thinking about the interactions between economies when there are no trade frictions and when there are not multiple currencies. We summarize our findings with a comparison between the stylized facts for international and intranational business cycles and draw some policy conclusions.