01824cas a2200241 a 4500 AALejournalIMF005714 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781451872200 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL Al-Hassan, Abdullah. A Coincident Indicator of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Business Cycle / Abdullah Al-Hassan. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2009. 1 online resource (34 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students This paper constructs a coincident indicator for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) area business cycle. The resulting coincident indicator provides a reliable measure of the GCC business cycle; over the last decade, the GCC coincident index and the real GDP growth have moved closely together. Since the indicator is constructed using a small number of common factors, the strong correlation between the indicator and real GDP growth points to a high degree of commonality across GCC economies. The timing and direction of movements in macroeconomic variables are characterized with respect to the coincident indicator. Finally, to obtain a meaningful economic interpretation of the latent factors, their behavior is compared to the observed economic variables. Mode of access: Internet IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2009/073 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2009/073/001.2009.issue-073-en.xml IMF e-Library