BEA Director Landefeld Outlines Plans for Key Data Programs

Looking ahead to how they might address issues of greatest concern to data users over the next several years, officials of the Bureau of Economic Analysis and their advisory committee recently explored how they can work together to evaluate the possibility of environmental accounting, new measures of health care prices and output, retirement and pension accounting, to name just a few.

In a Nov. 2 meeting with the BEA Advisory Committee at the agency’s headquarters, BEA Director J. Steven Landefeld first commented on how useful the panel’s research and recommendations have been over the last decade as BEA has worked to improve source data used in the national accounts and other key programs.

For their part, advisory panel members offered BEA officials their “blue sky” wish lists for program expansions or changes that they believe would help forecasters and analysts better measure aspects of the U.S. economy that have grown in importance and are currently not tracked as best they could be.   Improved price data, better health care measures of output and prices, and new measures of environmental and natural resources topped the list of most requested items.

Flexible GDP Revision Cycle, Price Index Comparisons

Building on its recent initiatives, BEA is moving ahead with plans to improve several key data programs, Landefeld told the advisory panel.  He included these highlights:

• Plans are moving forward to switch to a system of flexible annual revisions for the national accounts (including gross domestic product) from the current schedule of comprehensive revisions every five years.

• Starting in January 2008, the quarterly GDP report will include a reconciliation of changes in the personal consumption expenditure index and the consumer price index, which is compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

• Research continues on a prototype satellite account for the health care sector and on ways to address “data gaps and accounting issues” on employee stock options, bonuses, compensation, and profits.

• On the measurement of offshoring, the agency has launched an integrated trade-in-services survey and other improvements recently recommended by the National Academy of Science.

“Blue Sky” Suggestions Focus on Prices, Environmental Measures

The day-long advisory committee meeting ended with the “blue sky” discussion that provided a way for members to tell the agency what they would want the agency to pursue ideally, if there were not funding constraints.  Landefeld acknowledged that previous such discussions have led to significant advances in various economic measures across the agency.

Leading off the discussion, William Nordhaus, Yale University, said that “improved price data” is of major importance as BEA continues to work with BLS on refinements in key data series.  Consideration of environmental accounting is in order, he said, citing what he called a need for data on “subsoil assets” that could be used in addressing energy policy concerns.

Former NABE President Richard Berner, Morgan Stanley, offered a list of four broad areas that he believes need attention:  environmental accounts—including capital stocks and flows; filling the gaps on the “lack of data on national infrastructure” and how to fold the measures into the national accounts; integrating the national accounts with Federal Reserve measures with a goal of better measuring the U.S. share of the global economy; and reconciling different measures of income and other such key data programs to better understand how and why they differ.

Maurine Haver of Haver Analytics, also a former NABE president and currently chair of NABE’s Statistics Committee, told the meeting that she agreed with others’ recommendations that BEA pay more attention to health care accounting, development of a “green GDP,” and to improvement of prices measures in general.

For information about the advisory committee and links to presentations made at the November meeting go to: http://www.bea.gov/about/advisory.htm