Statistics Iceland releases now an aggregated overview of quarterly central and local government non-financial accounts for the 1st quarter of 2006. The figures are on accruals basis. These quarterly overviews are published 90 days after the end of the respective quarter and they are now available back to the 1st quarter of 2004.

The accounts for the central government are based on information from the Government Financial Management Authority but the data for local governments are based on a sample of accounts from 11 municipalities with 64,5% of the population in Iceland. These have been grossed up by Statistics Iceland. So far the breakdown of the data is rather limited but there are plans for providing more detailed data in the future. Here, two concepts are used to measure the financial result of the government. The first one is the concept called financial balance, which more or less corresponds to the national accounts concept, net lending/net borrowing, where gross fixed capital formation has been put to expenses but depreciation has not. The other concept is the operating balance where depreciation is put to expenses but gross fixed capital formation is not. Only the first concept is available for the central government and therefore the result for the general government is also restricted to that concept.

According to these preliminary figures, the central government revenue for the 1st quarter of 2006 amounted to 96.5 billion ISK and the financial balance was positive by 18.5 billion ISK, an improvement from the previous year.

The revenue of the local government in the 1st quarter 2006 is estimated to have amounted to 27.9 billion ISK, current expenditure to 27.8 billion rendering the operating balance positive by 0.1 billion ISK. However, the financial balance is estimated to have been negative by 2.3 billion ISK owing to higher investments than depreciation.

The total revenue of the general government, i.e. central and local government together, is estimated 124.4 billion ISK in the 1st quarter of 2006 and increased by 18.0% from the same quarter the year before. At the same time the current expenditure including investments but excluding depreciation increased substantially less or by 11.4% which resulted in an improvement of the overall financial balances of general government. Now it is estimated as 13.0% of total revenue compared with 7.8% in the 1st quarter of 2005.

In the figures presented here, both revenue and expenditure figures are recorded on an accrual basis whereas the monthly figures published by the Government Financial Authority are on cash basis. Accruals basis means that flows are recorded when they are established regardless of when the actual payment is made. The data presented here, both for central and local government, are preliminary. In particular, the information on investment of the local government is sketchy. In some cases these figures are recorded on a net basis in local government accounts. Here an attempt is made to record these items gross.

In order to ensure most proper comparison, preliminary figures for 2006 are compared with comparable preliminary figures of previous year, not final results of that year.

Statistics  (See "Quarterly non-financial accounts for general government 2004-2006")