L'Allemagne joue-t-elle le rôle de locomotive vis-à-vis de la France ?

Abstract

International real business cycles : is Germany a locomotive for France ? Catherine Bruno A major focus of attention in macroeconomics in recent years has been to identify empirically the forces that induce fluctuations in econo- mic aggregates. The motivation of this literature has been to assess the relative importance of real versus nomimal shocks in the generation and propagation of business cycles. The purpose of this paper is to extend this literature to an open-economy setting . We develop and estimate a multivariate, structural model to measure the relative contribution of supply, demand, monetary and competitiveness shocks in explaining French and German economic fluctuations. We also compare French and German stylized facts to each other. Our goal is to ask if Germany is a locomotive for France over the 1960-1989 sample. We notice that German output expansion always precedes French one and that Germany is a locomotive for France in the case of common supply shocks.