raustats: An R package for accessing ABS and RBA statistics

An R package for downloading Australian economic statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) websites.

Installation

You can install the released version of raustats from CRAN with:

install.packages("raustats")

or the latest development version from github with:

devtools::install_github("mitcda/raustats")

How to use raustats

To learn more about the raustats package, start with the vignettes:

browseVignettes(package = "raustats")

Introduction

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is Australia’s national statistical agency, providing trusted official statistics on a wide range of economic, social, population and environmental matters of importance to Australia. Key ABS statistical collections include:

• Australian National Accounts
• International Trade
• Consumer Price Index (CPI)
• Labour Force
• Population trends

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is Australia’s central bank. In addition to its legislative responsibilities, it collects and publishes statistics on money, credit, the Australian banking systems and other relevant economic metrics. Key RBA statistics include:

• Banking system assets and liabilities
• Money and credit statistics
• Household and business finances
• Interest rates
• Exchange rates
• Inflation and inflation expectations.

The ABS and RBA make their statistics primarily available through Excel and/or CSV spreadsheets.

This package provides functions to search and download data and statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) websites, as well as draft access to the ABS.Stat - Beta data catalogue API.

Examples

Downloading ABS Catalogue Statistics

ABS catalogue statistics may be downloaded, by catalogue number, using the abs_cat_stats() function. The following example downloads all Consumer Price Index (CPI) data series (ABS Catalogue no. 6401.0).

cpi_all <- abs_cat_stats("6401.0")

To download only the latest statistics reported in Table 1 (ABS groups Tables 1 and 2), simply provide a regular expression to the tables argument:

cpi <- abs_cat_stats("6401.0", tables="Table.+1")

The package also provides functions to ABS statistics via the ABS.Stat Beta API. See the package help and vignettes for examples.

Downloading RBA data

RBA data series may be downloaded by table number, using the rba_stats() function. The following example downloads Table A1 - Liabilities and Assets of the RBA.

rba_bs <- rba_stats("A1")