You probably noticed that today’s release of the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ (BEA) local area personal income statistics is missing some detail that’s normally included. Why?
Automatic budget cuts due to the 2013 sequester forced BEA to eliminate some data from the release, including detailed county-level statistics showing how much income people received from specific transfer receipts programs (unemployment benefits, Social Security, and Medicare); information on the categories of farm income and expenses; and data on the number of people employed by industry and the average wage per job.
BEA laid out the impact of the 2013 budget sequester on its local area personal income (LAPI) statistics on June 19. Today’s release is the first LAPI report affected by the automatic budget cuts.
BEA also scaled back some of the local statistical detail normally provided. For instance, today’s report contains detailed compensation and earnings information for 25 industries, instead of the usual 108.
For more information on how BEA’s LAPI statistics were affected by the 2013 sequester, please visit BEA’s Web site.
You can still access historical LAPI statistics that were produced before the detail was eliminated or reduced. Those statistics (which cover the period of 1969–2011 and were published November 2012) are available at http://www.bea.gov/regional/histdata, under the heading Local Area Personal Income.