Regional business cycles in Germany - the dating problem

The first part of this series of articles looked at the data situation. The second part now analyses the business cycle in the German federal states with the help of turnover data in manufacturing. First of all, the standard approaches in the literature for the definition of a business cycle and for the delimitation of its stages are discussed. The article focuses on the classical business cycle, presenting three dating methods. After discussing the specific features of processing the data, a presentation and discussion follows on the conventional cycle dating which gives us a chronicle of economic activity for the German federal states. If we compare the frequency of the cycles with those for Germany as a whole, it becomes clear that in this analysis significantly more turning points can be identified.