Fiscal Futures
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.
Complete documentation about the sources of Fiscal Futures’ data and the procedures used to compile the data is available on the Fiscal Futures github site
Figure 1: Illinois Expenditure and Revenue Totals
The interactive graph allows users to view Fiscal Futures totals in nominal dollars or adjust them using several economic indicators. These options help distinguish actual revenue or spending growth from changes caused by inflation, population change, government purchasing costs, or growth in the state economy. All adjustment series were pulled from FRED, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis economic data platform.
The data we use is listed below with the code necessary to pull it from FRED listed in parenthesis:
- Consumer Price Index (CPIAUCSL), which measures broad changes in consumer prices and expresses values in real purchasing-power terms;
- State and Local Government Price Deflator (A829RD3Q086SBEA), which reflects price changes for goods and services purchased by state and local governments;
- Producer Price Index for Government Purchases (WPSFD49406), which measures changes in the cost of nondefense government purchases;
- Illinois population (ILPOP), which converts totals to a per-resident basis;
- Illinois Gross State Product (ILNGSP), which compares fiscal totals to the size of the state economy.
Further details on the calculations are available here.