The Cyclical Adjustment of the Austrian Budget Balance by the European Central Bank
The European Central Bank will introduce a new estimator of the cyclical component of the general Austrian budget balance which modifies and extends the method recently developed by the OECD. The estimation extracts the cyclical component from direct taxes on households, direct taxes on enterprises, indirect taxes, social security contributions, unemployment expenditures, and pension benefits. In a first step revenue and expenditure elasticities with respect to macroeconomic indicators are estimated. The second step combines elasticities with Hodrick-Prescott filtered macroeconomic indicators to compute the cyclical component of each revenue and expenditure category. The resulting cyclically adjusted budget balance for Austria compares well with figures published by other international organisations.