Business Cycle Similarity Measuring in the Eurozone Member and Candidate Countries: An Alternative Approach

The article sheds some light on the process of measuring business cycle simi-larity and points out the fact that contemporary studies usually simplify this problem by measuring a simple correlation of cyclical development in GDP. The main goal is to assess the level of business cycle similarity in selected Eurozone member and candidate countries using the Concordance index. The article also includes a comparison of the Concordance index technique with traditional cor-relation methods. The results show that the Czech Republic belongs to the states with relatively high level of concordance comparing to the other Eurozone mem-ber and candidate countries. The resulting concordance measures also give an evidence of relatively low level of the business cycle similarity of Slovak economy and the Eurozone.