• International Area Studies Review
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.53-73
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• 2012

In this study we investigate the ability of the yield spread to predict economic recessions in two Asian economies. For our purpose we use the data from two emerging economies (South Korea and Thailand) that are also known for their openness in terms of exports and imports. We employ both two-regime Markov-Switching model (MS) and three-regime MS model to estimate the probability of recessions during Asian crisis. We found that the yield spread is confirmed to be a reliable recession predictor for Thailand but not for South Korea. The three-regime MS model is better for capturing the Asian financial crisis than two-regime MS model. We also tried to find the duration of economic expansions and recessions. We tested the hypothesis of asymmetric movements of business cycles. The MS results are also compared with that of the standard probit model for comparison. The MS model does not significantly improve the forecasting ability of the yield spread in forecasting business cycles.