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Seasonality and Capacity: an Application to Italy

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Author Info
Guido de Blasio () (Banca dÂ’Italia and International Monetary Fund)
Federico Mini (The World Bank)
Abstract

Information on seasonal frequencies can provide valuable insights for understanding economic fluctuations. This is particularly true for Italy, where the variability of production in manufacturing is extremely high and almost entirely due to seasonal factors. This paper identifies the qualitative and quantitative features of seasonal fluctuations in Italy and compares them to those of France and Germany. Seasonality in Italy is twice as large as in France, six times larger as in Germany. Qualitatively, seasonal fluctuations are extremely homogeneous across technologically different manufacturing sectors, giving informal support to the contention that Italian seasonality may be due to endogenous factors (synergies across agents) as opposed to exogenous ones (seasonality resulting from changes in underlying technology and preferences). Next, we quantify the amount of seasonally-driven excess capacity in the Italian manufacturing sector, and show that it is around thirty percent higher than that in France or Germany.

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Paper provided by Bank of Italy, Economic Research Department in its series Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) with number 403.

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Date of creation: Jun 2001
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Handle: RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_403_01

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Related research
Keywords: business cycle; seasonality;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
C49 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods: Special Topics - - - Other

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