The Australian Real-Time Fiscal Database: An Overview and an Illustration of its Use in Analysing Planned and Realised Fiscal Policies

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 realtime.
Methods are described which exploit the richness of the real-time datasets 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, consistent with a desire of the
government to appear more prudent than in reality, and a larger multiplier for policy
initiatives than implementation errors.