Regional business cycles in Germany - Part 1: The data situation

Regional business cycles are increasingly gaining importance, but there has been no coherent description and analysis of regional business cycles for the 16 federal states. In a three-part article in ifo Schnelldienst the authors describe how regional business cycles can be defined in Germany and examine the extent to which regional business-cycle trend converge over time. The first article describes the data situation in the various federal states. Because there is no monthly breakdown of GDP figures in the federal states, it is possible to use monthly turnover in manufacturing as approximately representative of the business cycle.