Business Cycles

Business cycle are defined as: ‘movements about trend in gross national product’, and the broader concept of business cycle regularities as ‘co-movements of the deviations from trend in different aggregative time series’. One way or another, most modern studies of business cycles have adopted definitions along these broad lies. By focusing on the cyclical co-movement between macroeconomic aggregates, this view is potentially quite different from the previous dominating paradigm with its focus on references cycles and on different phases in a given sequence of cycles. This approach led to a discussion which centered in the validity of rival doctrines, rather than in the characteristics of business fluctuations. The participants debated with each other on the basis of common knowledge, re-enforced by occasional citations of evidence.