Cyclical Fluctuations in CIS Economies

This paper documents a number of stylized facts of quarterly frequency cyclical fluctuations in a specific group of developing economies, previously belonging to the same country organization, the former Soviet Union. We find that in these countries (1) fluctuations are in general less persistent than elsewhere; (2) private consumption is extremely volatile; (3) net exports are procyclical and persistent in commodity exporter countries; (4) government consumption is a very important, dominantly procyclical determinant of output; (5) Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and to a smaller degree, Kazakhstan and Moldova are surprisingly similar in the behavior of their GDP components, industrial production and certain nominal variables; (6) there is mixed evidence regarding the dominance of supply versus demand shocks.