The usefulness of infra-annual government cash budgetary data for fiscal forecasting in the euro area
Luca Onorante,
Diego J. Pedregal,
Javier Pérez and
Sara Signorini
No 901, Working Paper Series from European Central Bank
Abstract:
Short-term fiscal indicators based on public accounts data are often used by European policy makers. They represent one of the main sources of publicly available intra-annual fiscal information. Nevertheless, these indicators have received limited attention from the academic literature analysing fiscal forecasting in Europe. Some recent literature suggests the validity of public accounts data to forecast government deficits in the euro area. We extend this literature on two fronts:(i) we shift the focus from indicators of government deficits to look at indicators for government total revenue and total expenditure; (ii) we use a mixed-frequency state-space model to integrate readily available monthly/quarterly cash-based fiscal data with annual general government series (National Accounts). By doing so, we are able to maintain the focus on forecasting and monitoring annual outcomes, while making use of infra-annual fiscal information, available within the current year. The paper makes a case for the use of monthly cash indicators for multi- lateral fiscal surveillance at the European level. JEL Classification: C53, E6, H6
Keywords: euro area; Fiscal forecasting and monitoring; Leading indicators (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-05
Note: 412615
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)
Downloads: (external link)
https://www.ecb.europa.eu//pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp901.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: The usefulness of infra-annual government cash budgetary data for fiscal forecasting in the euro area (2010) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ecb:ecbwps:2008901
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Working Paper Series from European Central Bank 60640 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Official Publications ().