Notice of RetractionAn empirical research of the business cycle synchronization among the GCC

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries plan to establish a single currency union in 2010. However, business cycle synchronization is one of the most fundamental conditions for the stability of the monetary union. This paper investigates whether the six gulf countries are equipped with the fundamental conditions for the stability of the monetary union according to their business cycle synchronization. Through establishing the vector error correction model (VECM) and applying the theory of common trends and common cycles, we do some empirical analyses for the six gulf countries in terms of the business cycle synchronization. The empirical results show that the six gulf countries´ outputs are co-integrated in the long run, and the business cycle of six countries is perfectly and totally synchronous in the short run. So the six gulf countries basically meet the fundamental criterion with respect to the stability of the monetary union.