Led by David Merriman, professor of public policy, management and analytics at the University of Illinois Chicago, the Fiscal Futures Project is a comprehensive, annually updated database that consolidates and categorizes budget data from across Illinois state government. Launched in 2008 to address long-term fiscal planning challenges, the project harmonizes data from over 700 state funds into an All-Funds budget, offering a clearer and more inclusive view than traditional budget reports. It also features the Fiscal Futures Model, which uses economic and demographic forecasts to project future revenues and expenditures. The project provides downloadable datasets, documentation for researchers, and an interactive website dashboard for visualizing and exploring the data.
In billions of nominal dollars. Red bars indicate economic recession. Source: Fiscal Futures processing of the Illinois Office of the Comptroller data.
The fiscal gap is total revenues minus total expenditures.