International Transmission of Medium-Term Technology Cycles: Evidence from Spain as a Recipient Country

Abstract

This paper documents stylized facts of international medium-term business cycles by exploring the pattern of comovement between a catching-up economy, Spain, and each of the obvious candidate countries to technological leadership of the 1950-2010 period, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. A remarkable feature of the international medium-term business cycle is the strong, positive lead displayed by the U.S. cycles of technology and international relative prices over Spain's macroeconomic aggregates. The corresponding evidence when the counterpart to Spain is a large European economy is weaker, particularly in the case of Europe's medium-term technology cycles. The vehicles that facilitate the international transmission of U.S. medium-term cycles are based on both bilateral trade and FDI linkages. International medium-term business cycle models may need to incorporate mechanisms relying on both embodied technical change and international relative prices to explain the observed stylized features.