Quarterly Bulletin

The South African Reserve Bank (SARB) publishes statistics on South Africa’s economy at the end of each quarter, in the Quarterly Bulletin (QB). The statistics are usually delayed by one period, depending on the frequency of the series. Themes covered include:

• Economic activity, by industry or sector
• Consumption expenditure
• Household debt and wealth
• The labour market
• Inflation
• International trade
• National accounts
• Financial sector indicators, and
• Some fiscal indicators.

This page describes the SARB Quarterly Bulletin data that Codera hosts on EconData. We keep the original statistical annexure chapter sources as separate dataflows in EconData, and the mnemonics correspond to the original series IDs from the data supplier (SARB).

Supplier source page

Dataflows

Dimensions

The series key contains two concepts, separated by a full stop.

1. Mnemonic

Original series number + letter (e.g. “7009L”)

2. Frequency

Derived EconData frequency code

freq_econdata <- case_when( 
        freq_raw == "D" ~ "D",  # daily
        freq_raw == "W" ~ "W",  # weekly
        freq_raw == "M" ~ "M",  # monthly
        freq_raw == "K" ~ "Q",  # quarterly
        freq_raw == "J" ~ "A"   # annually
)

Attributes

The metadata table included in the download contains the following columns.

• Price Concept: Either real/constant prices, or nominal/current prices.
• Seasonal adjustment: Statistical technique used to remove the effects of seasonal and calendar influences operating on a data series.
• Source Dataset: Descriptor of the source dataset.
• Source ID: Series ID used by the supplier (e.g. “KBP7198M”).
• Label: Human-readable label of series.
• Time transformation: Time-related operation performed on a time series, solely involving observations of that time series.
• Base period: Period of time used as the base of an index number, or to which a constant series refers.
• Unit of measure: Unit in which the data values are expressed.
• Unit multiplier: Exponent in base 10 specified so that multiplying the observation numeric values by 10^UNIT_MULT gives a value expressed in the unit of measure.
• Currency: “Monetary denomination of the object being measured.” For example, if the series is a USDZAR exchange rate (such as R19 /$), the unit of measure will be ZAR and the currency will be USD. Or, if foreign reserves are quoted in rands, the unit of measure will be ZAR, but the underlying currency will be the foreign currency. USD was used as the currency for the 5353, 5362 and 5363 forward cover rates. 7200 and 7201 are shipping rates indicies with currency USD.
• Financial year offset: Time interval between 1 January and the start of the financial year (often a three-month offset, for fiscal years). We record the period in the data table as the first day of the calendar period.

Entire List of Series

Whilst there are thousands of series, a few new series are added each quarter. Our program always extracts the latest, raw data, and you may use the list of series from the page titled “List of descriptions of all available Quarterly Bulletin time series” after clicking on Quarterly Bulletin on SARB’s website menu. Our list below is up-to-date as of 2024Q1.