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A stochastic, general equilibrium model of the world economy is developed to analyze the contribution of trade interdependence to international business cycles. We test some of the implications of the model using data from ten major industrial countries and a variety of detrending techniques to calculate the cyclical component of output. We find that the significance of trade in the transmission of economic disturbances across countries is not robust to the choice of the detrending method. In general, the role of trade interdependence is moderate and seem to have been stronger in the period before 1973.