CHANGES IN THIS ISSUE


DETECTION OF FRAME UNDERCOVERAGE

The ABS has identified and amended an undercoverage issue in its survey frame from the 2005 and 2009 surveys. This was amended for the 2013 survey, but the ABS was unable to source comparable data to revise historical estimates. As a result, estimates for expected future payments from trade with respect to the 2013 survey are not comparable with results from previous surveys.


NEW DATA ITEMS

The 2013 survey collected a number of new data items as an improvement on the previous collection. The new data includes expanded detail for existing data items and new dimensions, particularly for debt liability instruments. Additional data items, and references to publication tables where these have been included are as follows:

• Assets and liabilities, held with intra-group counterparties: Tables 6 and 7
• Assets and liabilities, by type of instrument: Table 7
• Hedging of foreign currency assets and liabilities: Table 10
• Hedging of short- and long-term debt security liabilities; Total value, value hedged and maturity matched value hedged: Tables 8, 11 and 12 respectively

CHANGES TO INSTRUMENT CLASSIFICATIONS

In this publication, for hedging policy and strategy information foreign equity assets combines both direct equity and portfolio equity assets. The previous survey collected the components separately.


CHANGES TO CURRENCY CLASSIFICATIONS

In this publication, the Swiss franc is not collected separately, and is now included in the Other currency class.


CHANGES TO MATURITY CLASSIFICATIONS

In this publication, two maturity classes have been introduced to replace the 'greater than 5 year' class published in previous issues. Maturity classes for 'greater than 5 years but less than or equal to 10 years' and 'greater than 10 years' are now available where applicable.

Results for 31 March 2013 exclude expected future foreign currency receipts and payments from trade in the 'greater than 10 years' time horizon. It was identified that these data would distort the analysis because of the greater uncertainty regarding individual unit's capacity to forecast estimates, in addition to the bias introduced by smaller businesses having greater difficulty reporting this information.


REORDERING OF TABLES

Tables presented in this publication and through the ABS web site have been reordered since the 2009 issue of Foreign Currency Exposure, Australia (cat. no. 5308.0). As a reference for users, a concordance to enable analyses across the current and previous issue of the publication has been provided in paragraph 21 of the Explanatory Notes.