Australia Has the World's Best Petrol Price Data: FuelWatch and FuelCheck

• Date: 01 December 2018
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Author: Jia Sheen Nah,Peng Xue,David P Byrne
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8462.12302

Data Survey

Australia Has the World’s Best Petrol Price Data: FuelWatch

and FuelCheck

David P Byrne, Jia Sheen Nah and Peng Xue*

Abstract

This article introduces two retail fuel price

databases in Australia, FuelWatch and Fuel-

Check. Each dataset consists of a complete

panel of station-level prices over time and

across stations, and they are available for

public access via web download. We provide

background on how the two databases were

established, describe their data-generating

processes, review some existing studies that

utilise these data, and provide suggestions for

future potential use.

1. Introduction

FuelWatch and FuelCheck are legislated retail

fuel price platforms operated by the state

governments of Western Australia (WA) and

New South Wales (NSW), respectively. Their

websites

1

display real-time information on

petrol prices across stations to help consumers

f‌ind the lowest-price stations. Luckily for

researchers and students in economics, espe-

cially those studying industrial organisation,

these platforms also make these real-time

station-level data publicly available, and they

can be readily accessed via web download.

Importantly, both datasets are complete: they

contain every price charged at every point in

time at every station since the respective

launches of FuelWatch (in January 2001) and

FuelCheck (in September 2016) through to the

present day.

At least in the context of industrial organi-

sation, there are many core issues that can be

examined with these unique datasets, including

collusion, price discrimination, mergers, con-

sumer search, vertical relations and the

dynamics of cost pass-through (Eckert 2013).

Because of the breadth of topics that can be

examined with petrol price data, this makes

retail petrol markets an ideal laboratory for

empirically examining problems in industrial

organisation.

In this article, we provide a detailed

overview of the data-generating processes

and contents of the FuelWatch and FuelCheck

databases. We describe how the data are

collected and published on each platform,

and follow this with a comprehensive descrip-

tion of the variables contained in each dataset.

* Byrne, Nah and Xue: Department of Economics, The

University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. Corre-

spondingauthor: Byrne,email <byrned@unimelb.edu.au>.

The Australian Economic Review, vol. 51, no. 4, pp. 564–577 DOI: 10.1111/1467-8462.12302

°

C2018 The University of Melbourne, Melbourne Institute: Applied Economic & Social Research,

Faculty of Business and Economics

Published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd