BEA continually explores new statistics as part of its mission to provide Americans with a better understanding of the ever-evolving U.S. economy. This research can lead to the development of special data sets. Some of these special topics include:
Distribution of Personal Income
BEA's distribution of personal income statistics take one of BEA's primary economic indicators – U.S. personal income – and measure how it is distributed across households. This provides a way to assess how households share in the nation's economic growth, bridging the gap between household-level data and national economic statistics.
These statistics build on BEA research to develop innovative methods and bring in new sources of data, including demographic surveys, aggregated tax records, and administrative records. Experimental nowcast statistics leverage machine learning techniques to generate the timeliest national estimates of the distribution of personal income by quintile, while prototype statistics show how personal income is distributed across households in each state and the District of Columbia.
Outdoor Recreation
Boating and biking, camping and climbing, hunting and hiking - they're all part of the BEA's outdoor recreation economic statistics. We're digging deeper into the data on these activities to help natural resource managers, the outdoor recreation industry, policymakers, and the public understand the role of outdoor leisure pursuits in the U.S. economy and each state.
These statistics feature the outdoor recreation industry's contributions to GDP. Other data include outdoor rec-related gross output, employment, and compensation for different types of industry, such as motor vehicle manufacturing. Data on gross output, a measure of sales or receipts, is produced for specific outdoor activities, such as biking, RVing, or snowboarding.
Digital Economy
The digital economy project is developing tools to measure the economic effects of fast-changing technologies like artificial intelligence and to understand their effects on global supply chains and the domestic economy.
This project seeks to improve measures of high-tech goods and services, including valuing digital-enabling infrastructure, e-commerce transactions, and digital media, and to advance research into AI, the sharing economy, and free digital content. It also offers a more complete picture of international trade, including trade in information and communications technology and digitally deliverable services.
Health Care
Our health care statistics are about more than spending and economic growth. They also help Americans better understand the delivery of care that's essential to their well-being. To better measure spending trends and treatment prices, BEA developed a set of supplemental health care economic statistics. These statistics give policymakers, researchers, and the public another way of understanding the economics of health care.
These statistics measure U.S. health care spending by the diseases being treated (for example, cancer or diabetes) instead of by the types of goods or services purchased (such as hospital or doctor's office visits). They also provide price indexes of treatments. At the same time, BEA continues to produce the traditional goods-and-services health care estimates that are part of our core statistics, such as GDP.
Household Production
What's the value of unpaid work done in the home – things like cooking, cleaning, watching the kids, and so forth? Economists have long recognized the importance of such work. But these unpaid tasks aren't included in BEA' calculation of the nation's gross domestic product, partly because they can't be tracked through marketplace transactions. We researched the monetary value of this labor to create household production economic statistics, which estimate how much larger GDP would be if unpaid household tasks were included, and also show trends in household work over time.
Going forward, we're exploring the feasibility of producing a set of household production economic statistics each year.
Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts
These tables provide a comprehensive picture of the U.S. economy, showing production, income, financial flows, and changes in net worth on the balance sheets of households, businesses, and governments.
The Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts were developed jointly with the Federal Reserve Board. They bring together data from BEA's National Income and Product Accounts and the Fed's Flow of Funds accounts, using consistent definitions, and present the information in a unified framework. This project fills information gaps and enhances the international comparability of U.S. statistics.
Integrated Industry-Level Production Account (KLEMS)
This is a rich data set for analyzing the sources of industries' growth (or decline) and how those sources affect growth across the U.S. economy. It's produced in collaboration with the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, integrating BEA's GDP by industry data with capital input and labor hours data from BLS.
The Integrated Industry-Level Production Account traces the sources of growth in GDP and output from their industry origins by examining changes in capital; labor; intermediate purchases of energy, materials, and services; and multifactor productivity.
Accounts of this nature are often referred to as "KLEMS" accounts after the broad categories of inputs that industries use in their production (K=capital, L=labor, E=energy, M=materials, and S=purchased services).