Papers

The System of National Accounts 2025 revision recommends treating own-account data as an intangible capital asset. This study explores the impact of this recommendation on the sources of economic growth for the U.S. economy from 2002 to 2024. We use experimental estimates for own-account data… Read more

Human capital is a primary driver of economic growth, yet the United States lacks an official measure in its national accounts. This accounting fails to capture education’s full economic significance and contrasts sharply with how other capital assets contribute to GDP. The omission risks… Read more

Productivity growth is the fundamental driver of improvements in living standards. However, accurately measuring productivity remains challenging for the health care sector, which accounts for about 18% of the U.S. economy. We develop a framework that combines a utility-based measure of output… Read more

This article describes the proposed methodology and experimental estimates for capitalizing own-account data as part of the updates to the System of National Accounts from the 2008 standard to the 2025 revision. The methodology explains how the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates annual… Read more

Currently, there is not a line item in the U.S. national accounts that can be used to identify and measure the economic impact of artificial intelligence (AI). Therefore, we use tools to indirectly estimate the impact of AI via the lens of BEA’s industry accounts. Throughout, we discuss… Read more

This paper presents pilot physical and monetary energy fow accounts (PEFA and MEFA, respectively) for the United States, covering 2012–2022/2023. These pilot accounts integrate existing economic and energy statistics to track energy fows through the economy in accordance with international… Read more

This paper develops a framework to examine the factor composition embedded in U.S. value added across final demand components by integrating value-added data with Integrated Industry-Level Production Account (KLEMS) statistics. This approach quantifies factor-specific value added within U.S.… Read more

This paper details BEA’s ongoing efforts to develop experimental statistics on federal government consumption expenditures and gross investment by state. These new statistics would provide valuable information for policymaking, research, and business decision-making at the state level,… Read more

This paper provides an update on BEA’s research into ultimate host economy statistics for U.S. direct investment abroad (USDIA). A previous BEA working paper (Brew et al. 2023) explored producing statistics on equity position by… Read more

Off-the-shelf growth accounting is typically used to assess the sources of economic growth, and recently established approaches to measuring trade in value added are typically used to decompose domestic and foreign content in bundles of final demand. This paper merges the two approaches to… Read more