What Drives Business Cycles in Egypt? An Analysis of Coincident and Leading Indicators

The paper proposes a chronology for the Egyptian economy by detecting phases of expansions and recessions during the period (2002–2019). It examines the cyclical behavior of variables that are considered potentially useful in measuring or predicting aggregate economic activity. To do so, we combine the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) approach together with time series analysis techniques to select the variables best suitable to play the role of coincident and leading indicators. This methodology is found to be the most appropriate when there is no well-established reference chronology as a benchmark for the cyclical analysis, which is the case of Egypt. As a result, two composite indexes are constructed: 1) the composite index of coincident economic indicators (CEI), which can be considered an adequate measure for the Egyptian business cycle; 2) the composite index of leading economic indicators (LEI) that shows good performance in anticipating aggregate economic activity in Egypt. Moreover, the empirical results indicate that total employment, consumption, and investment move coincidently with the reference cycle, while exchange rate and interest rate variables lead the reference cycle and have strong predictive power for economic activity in Egypt.