Is the South African business cycle time dependent?

Abstract

This study is concerned with the South African business cycle and makes use of the hazard function to determine the importance of duration for its analysis. This function gives the conditional probability that a state sustained through a previous period will end in the current one. The study estimates this probability for both economic downturn and expansion. At the 95 per cent confidence level, there is no statistical underpinning found for conventional ideas about the likelihood of an upturn or downturn in the economy over time. The duration of a business cycle does not help predict the turning point