A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora
A consistent theme throughout the history of BEA and its forerunners—driven by significant public and policymaker demand—is the expansion of our regional statistics. This expansion began with the publication of our first annual statistics on state income payments in 1939, and has continued since.
As you might imagine, there has been keen interest in developing state and local statistics comparable to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). We took a step in that direction in 1951 with the publication of data on regional trends. While this report estimated production for seven major geographic areas of the country, it didn’t provide the equivalent of state-level GDP.
After years of research and development, that breakthrough came in 1985 with the publication of experimental estimates of annual gross state product, or GSP, by industry for select years. Official estimates followed a few years later in 1988. We updated the name of the series to GDP by state in 2006, and met user demand for a higher frequency series by beginning to publish quarterly GDP by state estimates in 2015.
Continuing to build on these innovations, and in line with significant user demand, we embarked on providing even more geographic granularity. Specifically, in 2007 BEA released annual GDP statistics for metropolitan areas, and we followed that up in 2018 by publishing annual GDP by county statistics.
As you can see, BEA has expanded and improved GDP statistics dedicated to states and localities for many years. That history of innovation, and the needs of data users, continue to be our guiding lights as regional statistics move into the future.