The Australian Real?Time Datbase: An Overview and an Illustration of its Use in Business Cycle Analysis

This paper describes a newly constructed macroeconomic database for Australia including measures of GDP, its components, prices, and key monetary and labour market statistics over the last fifty 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.