A Prototype BEA/BLS Industry‐Level Production Account for the United States

In recent years, much interest has been paid to structural changes at the industry level in the United States economy and their implications for competitiveness. The most‐recent business cycle and subsequent recovery have furthered these interests in understanding the sources of economic growth, including output, input, and multifactor productivity (MFP) growth across all industries—both goods‐ and services‐producing industries—in the U.S. economy.

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by Industry statistics provide detailed information on the industry sources of aggregate value added growth, but do not include estimates of the contributions of capital and labor inputs and MFP to economic growth. MFP measures the output per unit of capital, labor, and intermediate inputs, and is an important component of growth in GDP. MFP growth is calculated as the growth that cannot be explained by changes in the combined contribution of these factor inputs. The official MFP measures provide information on components of economic growth in the market economy; but they do not report detailed information on the nonmarket economy. While these two sets of statistics share a common economic accounting framework; in the United States, they are prepared by two separate agencies. GDP statistics are published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), U.S. Department of Commerce and MFP and labor productivity statistics are published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Department of Labor. Differences in concepts and methods used by each agency persist due to the different nature of each program, but each statistical program depends on the other to prepare its measures.

This paper builds on the GDP by industry statistics produced by the BEA and the capital, labor and MFP statistics produced by the BLS to assemble an industry‐level production account for the United States that is consistent with GDP. The key feature of this internally‐consistent prototype account is to provide values, prices, and quantities of outputs and inputs used in the industry production process. This set of accounts allows one to decompose the industry contributions of inputs and MFP to the sources of GDP growth at the aggregate level.  

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