Abstract

The currently observed downturn in economic activity is seen as the most serious one in post II World War history. The disturbances of financial markets have triggered the deepest globally-synchronized recession. In our research we would like to describe the influence of the financial crisis on the business cycles in the United States and selected European Union countries. We also would like to find out if the breakdown of the business and consumer survey results (Economic Sentiment Indicator, Industry Confidence Indicator, Construction Confidence Indicator, and Consumer Survey) was reflected in real data such as GDP, household consumption, gross fixed capital formation, industrial production, construction and assembly production. For the purpose of our analysis we have used data published by Eurostat. The only exception was the qualitative data for Poland which were taken from IRG SGH database. All the data were seasonally adjusted with use of Tramo-Seats procedure which also allowed us to remove the outliers. The business cycle frequencies were filtered out by the Christiano-Fitzgerald band-pass filter. Then we identified the turning points with the use of Bry-Boschan routine implemented in BUSY software. Next, we computed the depth of recession starting from the latest peak and to the trough if it was recognized, or to the last available observation, if it was not recognized. In the case of quantitative data, we analyzed classical and deviation cycles. For qualitative data, only deviation cycles were considered. Our research identified the Baltic States as the most affected by the current recession. Poland was least affected. We also confirmed the leading behavior of qualitative data vs. the quantitative sets. It is worth noting that our research indicated the dependency of the depth of recession in quantitative data on the drop in surveys data. This however needs some more formal statistical analysis, especially to confirm the causality.