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Australian Real‐Time Database: An Overview and an Illustration of its Use in Business Cycle Analysis *
Author(s) -
LEE KEVIN,
OLEKALNS NILSS,
SHIELDS KALVINDER,
WANG ZHENG
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
economic record
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.365
H-Index - 42
eISSN - 1475-4932
pISSN - 0013-0249
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-4932.2012.00844.x
Subject(s) - exploit , gross domestic product , business cycle , database , real time database , national accounts , computer science , macroeconomics , economics , econometrics , computer security
This article describes a newly constructed macroeconomic database for Australia including measures of gross domestic product (GDP), its components, prices and key monetary and labour market statistics over the last 50 years as published and revised in real time. Data vintages are collated from various sources and accommodate multiple definitional changes, providing a comprehensive description of the macroeconomic environment actually experienced by Australian policy‐ and decision‐makers. The database exposes the difficulties in drawing inferences and decision‐making based on macroeconomic data that is subsequently revised. Methods are described that can exploit the real‐time dataset and they are illustrated through an analysis of the Australian output gap.