Global financial crisis and decoupling hypothesis

Abstract

The purpose of the paper was to present the decoupling hypothesis which says that the performance of the emerging economies becomes relatively independent from the changes in advanced economies, and to empirically verify this hypothesis. The Christiano-Fitzgerald band-pass filter and spectral analyses have been applied to examine the hypothesis. On the basis of obtained results, if one compares the deviations of GDPs from their long-term trend, it seems that the synchronization of cycles between emerging and advanced economies was already high before the crisis. The last global crisis, especially if time shifts between the countries are taken into account, even increased the synchronization of the economies. Therefore, this paper presents evidence against the decoupling hypothesis, and at the same time it raises doubts whether the high GDP growth rates in emerging economies can be sustainable in the presence of the slow-down in the advanced economies.