RDP 2005-06: Credit and Monetary Policy: An Australian SVAR Appendix B: Data Descriptions and Sources

Real commodity prices (comm): Index of commodity prices in US dollars (Reserve Bank of Australia), deflated by the United States underlying CPI (Datastream code: USCPXFDEE).

US gross domestic product (usgdp): The natural logarithm of seasonally adjusted quarterly real US GDP (Datasteam code: USGDP…D).

Australian gross domestic product (gdp): The natural logarithm of seasonally adjusted quarterly real Australian GDP (ABS Cat No 5206.0).

Real break-adjusted credit (cred): The natural logarithm of seasonally adjusted break-adjusted Australian credit (Reserve Bank of Australia, Bulletin Table D.2) deflated by the weighted median consumer price index excluding taxes and charges (Reserve Bank of Australia). Break adjustment occurs for various reasons (for example, the securitisation of loans). The quarterly credit series is constructed as for the last month of the quarter. Credit is defined as ‘lending and credit to the private non-finance sector (including public trading enterprises) or, where stated, the government sector, by those financial intermediaries whose liabilities are included in broad money’.

Inflation (π): Quarterly inflation of the weighted median consumer price index excluding taxes and interest (Reserve Bank of Australia).

Overnight cash rate (i): Overnight cash rate, averaged over the quarter. Nominal official cash rate until June 1998, and then the interbank overnight rate (Reserve Bank of Australia).

Real trade-weighted index (twi): Real trade-weighted exchange rate index (Reserve Bank of Australia).