Important Information for Quarterly Retail Trade
Today we are releasing information on Retail Trade. This includes two things, an error correction for the June 2017
quarter and the information paper for the new design for Retail Trade. These two things are independent from each other.
These are being released together so you have as much information as we can give you at the moment.
We republished Retail Trade Survey: June 2017 quarter on 30 October 2017 to correct an error in the system used to model
the contribution of units sourced from administrative data (GST) for the liquor and electrical and electronic goods
industries.
The error affects the liquor and electrical and electronic goods industries, plus the core (excluding vehicle related
industries) and all industries totals. The correction affects all sales figures published for these industries including
values and volumes. The total values by region are also affected by this change.
• liquor has been revised down by $25.32 million
• electrical and electronic goods has been revised down by $26.73 million.
The other industries and stocks values have not changed due to this correction.
The seasonally adjusted sales volumes for all industries total in the June 2017 quarter has now been revised to an
increase of 1.7 percent after previously being published as a 2.0 percent increase. There is no significant impact on
quarterly GDP June 2017 results.
Note: We will not be rerunning any requests based on the current time series. This is because the new time series will
be published with the September quarter data released on 23 November 2017.
Information paper on the new design for retail trade
As we've indicated previously we’ve written a paper on the new methodology and an indication of key differences in the
new time series. The new time series is based on a new design so it is expected that the levels will be different. We
have created a backseries for the new design. Please see Methodology changes to the Retail Trade Survey for more details on the paper.
We are also expecting to release a provisional backcast series on 3 November 2017. This data is only provisional as the
September quarter data needs to be integrated in, so the backcasting may change. Seasonal adjustment will also need to
be run over the series again, as we get more information this can cause changes in the seasonal pattern.
ENDS