Abstract

MEJIA REYES, Pablo; GUTIERREZ ALVA, Elías Eduardo  and  FARIAS SILVA, Claudia Adriana. The Synchronization of the Economic Cycles of Mexico and the Unites States. Inv. Econ [online]. 2006, vol.65, n.258, pp.15-45. ISSN 0185-1667.

This paper analyses the degree of synchronization between the US business cycles and sector industrial and manufacturing production of Mexico over the period 1980-2003. We apply the popular methodology introduced by Kydland and Prescott (1990) to five-year rolling windows, so that at the end we obtain a series of correlation coefficients which gives information about the evolution of such synchronisation. Some important findings of this paper are: 1) the synchronization between the US business cycle and the specific cycles of the Mexican sector production has increased in the context of North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), especially in the aggregate; 2) the number of productive activities that are contemporaneous or that follow the us business cycle has increased substantially (compared to that of the previous period), exhibiting degrees of correlation which stabilise on mild levels; 3) the production of metallic products, machinery and equipment shows the greatest synchronisation to the US business cycle, which suggests that underlying factors such as intra-industry trade (and shared-production schemes) and foreign investment (and the implicit experience in the international markets) are important transmission mechanisms of cyclical fluctuations between countries.

        · abstract in Spanish     · text in Spanish     · Spanish ( pdf )