Impact of 2008 Federal Budget on the Availability and Quality of Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis

The FY 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act provides $77.5 million in funding to the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the 2008 fiscal year that began on October 1, 2007.  This funding level provides for a regional statistics initiative, but does not provide for the research and development (R&D) satellite account initiative, and does not provide full funding for BEA base programs in FY 2008.  In more detail:     

• The FY 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act provides incremental funding for BEA to produce metropolitan area gross domestic product (GDP) estimates on a regular basis and to develop methods for further accelerating the availability of regional data.
• The FY 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act does not provide funding for the R&D satellite account requested in the President’s Budget, and the work on the satellite account outlined in the budget will not move forward in FY 2008.
• The FY 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act also does not provide full funding for BEA’s existing programs.  In order to align base programs with the new budget, BEA will:
  • Raise reporting thresholds and reduce the level of detail collected in BEA’s surveys of the operations of multinational companies. 
  • Eliminate the survey of new direct investment in U.S. companies by foreign companies (BEA will continue to collect data on total direct investment flows, but will no longer be able to distinguish investments in existing companies from “Greenfield” and other new investments).
  • Eliminate the Benchmark Capital Flow Tables, which provide baseline data on industry by industry investment by type of investment.
  • Reduce industry detail in BEA’s county data from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) subsector level to the sector level.
  • Eliminate the annual reconciliation of IRS taxable income and NIPA personal income and the annual table showing personal taxes on the basis of liabilities. 
  • Eliminate production of GDP statistics on a seasonally-unadjusted basis.

BEA recognizes that reduction or elimination of any of its statistics is not desirable for its data users.  Our staff has given careful consideration to which statistical programs to reduce in an effort to make these changes as unproblematic as possible.  BEA will continue to produce all of its core statistics.  The three criteria used to determine which BEA statistics are core are: (1) statistics that feed into the estimation of gross domestic product and related statistics, (2) statistics required by law, or (3) statistics required for the administration of Federal programs.

BEA will provide additional detail on the programmatic reductions as these plans progress.     

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