Business Cycles and Economic Convergence in the ECCAS Zone

This article is part of an investigation into business cycles and the convergence of integrated economies. In contrast to the literature on business cycle synchronization in a monetary union, we study the convergence of business cycles in the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), which is characterized by monetary heterogeneity. More specifically, we extract GDP cycles using the Baxter and King (1999) filter and then date them using the Bry and Boschan (BB, 1971) algorithm. In addition, two measures of convergence are used: sigma-convergence, which measures the degree of convergence over time of the economies identified, and beta-convergence, which evaluates their adjustment process to a reference value. The findings attest to the asynchronous nature of business cycles in the ECCAS zone from 1990 to 2018. Also, a weak trend towards convergence has been observed since 2001, both in nominal terms (inflation, basic budget balance, public debt rate) and in real terms (GDP/capita and GNI/capita).