Reserve Bank of Australia: historical interest rates

As a heads up, the Reserve Bank of Australia has a section labelled “historical data”: spreadsheets that with older back history. (Since these are back history, they won’t change.)

For the interest rate data (tables F1, F2), this would allow a longer back history of those series.

The spreadsheets appear to be the same format, with the same series identifiers, so it would just be a one-time splice of data. (I only looked at F1 and F2.) There are also monthly back history spreadsheets, but with different series identifiers.

The historical data page: https://www.rba.gov.au/statistics/historical-data.html

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Thanks for your suggestion! Indeed, the RBA fetcher was not planned to include those historical datasets (cf fetcher spec).

We have not planned to add new data on existing providers right now. However, DBnomics is a contributive project so:

  • we accept technical contributions:
    if you’d like these datasets to be on DBnomics, you can enhance the RBA fetcher. We can help you by writing documentation about how to do that. We still have work to do but could prioritize it if you are ready to contribute.
  • we accept financial contributions:
    we can implement new fetchers on demand, or improve existing ones, in shorter delays, in exchange of financial contribution.

Again thank you for your interest in the project. We are following your progress on your project Econ Platform. Please let us know how we can improve your experience as a contributor.

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Documentation on the fetcher API would be appreciated, but it may be easier if I just ask questions when things come up. (I just realised that you had the fetching code posted before I was notified about this, so I did not have time to look at what exists.)

I am on a project where I wrapping together data providers/databases/languages into a single front end that does “dynamic fetching” for analysts: the “fetch” call either goes to the internet for an update or the local database if the series is deemed up-to-date.

I will have to see how easy to switch over to emulating the DB.nomics fetcher interface, so my fetchers would be interchangeable with the ones here. (I’ve only worked on ones using spreadsheets, and used your API to get SDMX data from DB.nomics’ database.) Once that’s done, I could pass along my code that does the historical spreadsheet parsing.