Author(s)

Ulrich Kevin Kamdoum Kamwa

International Center for Research in Economics and Management for Development (ICREMD), OMAR BONGO University, Libreville, Gabon.

This article is part of the analysis of business cycles and the convergence of integrated economies. In contrast to work on the convergence of business cycles in a monetary union, we study the synchronization of business cycles within the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), characterized by heterogeneity monetary. Thus, we first extract cycles from GDP using the Baxter and King (1999) filter; then we date the cycles using the Bry and Boschan (BB, 1971) algorithm, and finally we measure cyclical co-movements using the Harding and Pagan (2006) concordance index. Furthermore, sigma-convergence is used to measure the degree of closeness over time of the identified economies, on the one hand, and beta-convergence to measure their adjustment process over time with respect to a reference value, on the other hand. The results obtained attest to the asynchronous nature of business cycles in the ECCAS zone over the period from 1990 to 2018. Thus, a weak trend towards convergence, both nominal (inflation, basic budget balance, public debt ratio) and real (GDP/capita and GNI/capita) has been observed since 2001.

Business Cycle, Baxter and King Filter, Economic Convergence

Kamwa, U. (2020) Cycle Synchronization and Economic Convergence in ECCAS Zone. Theoretical Economics Letters, 10, 1146-1165. doi: 10.4236/tel.2020.105068.