• Management & Information Systems Review
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• v.35 no.3
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• pp.1-22
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• 2016

We analyzed the international comovements and structural changes in the quarterly real GDP by the Markov-switching vector autoregressive model (MS-VAR) from 1971(1) to 2016(1). The main results of this study were as follows. First, the business cycle phenomenon that occurs in the models or individual time series in real GDP has been grasped through the MS-VAR models. Unlike previous studies, this study showed the significant comovements, asymmetry and structural changes in the MS-VAR model using a real GDP across countries. Second, even if there was a partial difference, there were remarkable structural changes in the economy contraction regime(recession), such as 1988(2) ending the global oil shock crisis and 2007(3) starting the global financial crisis by the MS-VAR model. Third, large-scale structural changes were generated in the economic expansion and/or contraction regime simultaneously among countries. We found that the second world oil shocks that occurred after the first global oil shocks of 1973 and 1974 were the main reasons that caused the large-scale comovements of the international real GDP among countries. In addition, the spillover between Korea and 5 countries has been weak during the Asian currency crisis from 1997 to 1999, but there was strong transmission between Korea and 5 countries at the end of 2007 including the period of the global financial crisis. Fourth, it showed characteristics that simultaneous correlation appeared to be high due to the country-specific shocks generated for each country with the regime switching using real GDP since 1973. Thus, we confirmed that conclusions were consistent with a number of theoretical and empirical evidence available, and the macro-economic changes were mainly caused by the global shocks for the past 30 years. This study found that the global business cycles were due to large-scale asymmetric shocks in addition to the general changes, and then showed the main international comovements and/or structural changes through country-specific shocks.