IS THERE A POSTWAR GROWTH CYCLE?*

Joseph A. Licari and Mark Gilbert

Kyklos, 1974, vol. 27, issue 3, 511-520

Abstract: The existence of a quasi‐periodic cycle in growth rates of major economic indicators has become one of the more popular stylized facts in interpreting postwar macro‐dynamics. In this paper, we examine the statistical record of sixteen OECD countries over the 1950‐1970 period to determine the degree of regularity in movements of annual growth rates in both GNP and several disaggregated components. The Wallis‐Moore test is employed to establish the significance of the deviation of growth rate fluctuations from those of a purely random series. In only 13 of the 90 series investigated were these deviations statistically significant and in only two countries, Germany and Finland, were more than one growth series significantly non‐random. These results suggest that there is little statistical significance to the growth cycle hypothesis from an annual perspective and that postwar macro‐dynamics generally fail to reflect in the growth rate domain much of the regularity observed in the more traditional business cycle of the prewar period.

Date: 1974
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1974.tb01097.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:kyklos:v:27:y:1974:i:3:p:511-520

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0023-5962

Access Statistics for this article

Kyklos is currently edited by Rene L. Frey

More articles in Kyklos from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().