Introduction

The publication of Québec’s budget statistics is an integral part of the government’s budgetary accountability. It seeks, in particular, to facilitate monitoring of the government’s overall revenue and expenditure on a historic basis. Also, forecasts for 2018-2019 to 2020-2021 complete the picture of historical trends.

These statistics are divided into the following five chapters:

• revenue and expenditure, which provide a summary of the change in consolidated results;
• revenue and expenditure according to the government's financial organization, which show the change in results according to the various sectoral components included in the government reporting entity;
• consolidated financial transactions, which show the government’s treasury and financing transactions;
• debt of the Québec government;
• statistics adjusted for historical analysis, including Québec’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The first four chapters present the budgetary information as published in the Public Accounts, but also take into account certain changes made to government accounting over the years.

• When the impact of an accounting change on the historical statistics as a whole can be determined, the data published herein have been updated. Such situations pertain mainly to changes made to the budgetary structure and to those related to tax-funded expenditures.
• Conversely, when the impact of an accounting change cannot be determined precisely with reasonable effort, the data have not been updated. This gives rise to a break in the continuity of the data that makes it more difficult to interpret the change in data. Therefore, owing to the breaks in data caused by the 2006-2007 accounting reform and the line-by-line consolidation of the network's bodies in 2009-2010, judgment must be exercised in comparing the data.

The information presented in Chapter 5 does not contain any breaks. The change in revenue and expenditure is presented on a comparable basis, that is, it has been adjusted using parametric estimates for the various accounting changes.