The Australian Real-Time Fiscal Database: An Overview with Illustrations of Its Use in Analysing Fiscal Policy

Abstract

This paper describes a fiscal database for Australia including measures of government spending, revenue, deficits, debt and various sub‐aggregates as initially published and subsequently revised. The data vintages are collated from various sources and provide a comprehensive description of the Australian fiscal environment as experienced in real time. Methods are described which exploit the richness of the real‐time data sets, and they are illustrated through an analysis of the extent to which stated fiscal plans are realised in practice and through the estimation of fiscal multipliers which draw a distinction between policy responses and policy initiatives. We find predictable differences between plans and actual fiscal policy and a larger multiplier for policy initiatives than for implementation errors.