Business Cycles Analysis in Cameroon: An Overview

Abstract

This paper aims at conducting a thorough analysis of business cycles in Cameroon by statistically assessing their main characteristics. The analysis is carried out by considering the three dimensions of macroeconomic fluctuations. By assessing output volatility, light on the sensitivity of the economy to exogenous shocks as well as to endogenous sources of instability is shed. Likewise, analysing the co-movements of aggregate variables of interest helps in understanding the extent to which the observed fluctuations relate to other aggregates in the economy and hence, the main forces driving the dynamics of this economy. Eventually, more light could be shed on macroeconomic dynamics by analysing the timing and persistence of business cycles. Overall, such analysis is conducted using basic statistical tools commonly used in the empirical literature on business cycles. These are the standard deviation as a measure of volatility, cross-correlations as a means of analysing comovements and auto-correlations as measures of persistence. The main limitation in this study is the linear consideration of observed data. In fact, many macroeconomic and financial time-series that are used in quantitative macroeconomic models are subject to a number of regime-switching in reality. This fact needs to be taken into account in the subsequent research.