Consumer Spend Potential (Australia) consists of categories that represent key elements of household expenditure. The full set of categories for which estimates are produced is listed in the consumer_spend_potential_aus_data_schema.xlsx workbook, included in the product delivery file.
The scope of categories provided in CSP is informed primarily by data available from the Australia Bureau of Statistics' Household Expenditure Survey (HES), a six-yearly project that investigates detailed spending habits of nearly 10,000 households. The resulting output covers hundreds of unique headings or household goods and services. It is this hierarchy on which the CSP category framework is based.
The choice of categories to model is predicated on extensive consulting work conducted by Precisely for its clients, as well as on feedback from CSP users. This demand for information is balanced against standard errors in the Household Expenditure Survey, in which the median standard error for each state and territory ranges from 16% to 38% (with some standard errors for individual spending categories reaching in excess of 100%). While Precisely uses a variety of sources to balance out some of the methodological issues with the HES, the survey remains an important input into CSP and we are not able to overcome the inherent weaknesses therein.
CSP provides estimates of total and per capita expenditure for just over 95% of SA1s in Australia. An SA1 is a region comprised of an average of approximately 150 households and is the smallest geography for which the Australian Bureau of Statistics currently provides full Census information.
SA1s that are excluded from CSP are those that are atypical and for which the ABS cannot calculate a SEIFA (Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas) score because the SA1 in question either contains too few people or covers a specialized area, such as a national park or the men's prison in Goulburn, NSW.