When You Move, I Move: Increasing Synchronization Among Asia's EconomiesIn recent decades, trade integration within Asia has increased more than in other regions. In valued-added terms, intraregional trade grew on average by over 10 percent a year from 1990 to 2012, twice the pace seen outside of Asia. Likewise, financial integration within the region has started to catch up, although it still lags behind trade integration. Concomitantly, business cycles in Asia have become steadily more synchronized over the past two decades, with the correlation between ASEAN economies'growth rates almost reaching the very high levels seen within the Euro Area.As outlined in the IMF Asia and Pacific Department's latest Regional Economic Outlook, these facts are related. Namely, increases in trade and financial integration have strengthened the propagation of growth shocks between regional partners, leading Asian economies to move more in lockstep. One driver of this synchronization of business cycles has been the increase in size and connectedness of China's economy. Looking ahead, we expect regional integration agenda and a bigger China to further increase spillovers and growth co-movement across the region. Greater international cooperation, particularly regional and global financial safety nets, can help countries respond to the associated risk of more synchronized , sharper downturns, and thereby help Asia make the most of greater regional integration. Trade integration has been an important synchronizing force for Asian business cyclesOn the trade side, our study brings a novel finding: what makes two economies co-move—by propagating shocks across borders—is the intensity of their bilateral trade in value-added terms, not in gross terms. The iPhone supply chain example illustrates why this makes sense; although China exports the product to the US, its domestic firms add only a small fraction of the overall value added, so that gross exports vastly over-estimate the dependence of the Chinese economy on final demand from American consumers. The reverse holds for Korea or Taiwan of China POC, which reap sizeable value added through exports of components to China mainland even though they don't export any iPhones to the US. Overall, the trend increase in the value-added traded between Asian economies over the past two decades has accounted for around one-quarter of the concomitant increase in business cycle synchronization across the region.Financial integration has been a more ambivalent force. Across the world, it has magnified the impact on business cycle synchronization of large global shocks like the global financial crisis, as global banks pulled funds back across the board. But in normal times, it has lowered synchronization somewhat , possibly by facilitating international reallocation of capital when a shock hits one country. However, this has been less of a factor in Asia, where cross-border financial claims and flows have so far been comparatively small.