Research Tools

Ready Reckoner

The PBO’s Ready Reckoner is an online tool to estimate the potential impacts on federal budgetary revenues that would arise from adjusting various federal tax rates, credits, and brackets.

PBO's COVID-19 Analysis

The PBO’s COVID-19 analysis products are designed to assist Canadians and parliamentarians gauge the potential implications of the pandemic on the Canadian economy and the Government’s finances.

The tool provides access to all the PBO’s COVID-19 Analysis, including:

• The PBO’s COVID-19 Cost Estimates;
• The PBO’s latest Economic and Fiscal Outlook, and the COVID-19 measures included in it; and,
• COVID-19 Costings Requested by Parliamentarians.

The PBO’s prior Scenario Analysis has been archived and is also available.

Personnel Expenditure Analysis Tool

To assist parliamentarians’ scrutiny, the PBO has built an interactive tool that allows users to compare trends across time for overall government spending or a single department by:

• Viewing overall historic spending trends for operating and personnel spending;
• Examining the various types of remunerations that are part of the government’s spending on personnel;
• Examining historic employment trends for full-time equivalents;
• Benchmarking between similar departments, or self-selecting departments for comparison.

Public Debt Charges Calculator

Within the framework of the 2019 electoral campaign, the PBO developed a tool allowing political parties to estimate the interest charges from their new proposals.

For example, if a party wants to implement a measure and its cost is financed by the public debt, then public debt charges will be added to the cost of said measure. Similarly, if a party wants to implement a measure with a net expected revenue, then the revenue would reduce the public debt and would therefore reduce the public debt charges.

To use the tool, the user must only enter in the appropriate boxes the expected revenue and spending associated with the measure(s) for which they want to estimate the cost in interest. Interest rates projected by the PBO are then applied to the difference between the revenue and the spending. As a result, the user will be able to see the cumulative surplus/deficit including public debt charges associated with one or more measures. The results are displayed over a 5-year horizon.