Special Topics

A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora

My sons complain a lot about their chores—especially cutting the grass. I wonder if it would make them feel better to know that all their time sweating in the sun pushing a mower gets measured by BEA through our household production statistics. They might be even more excited to know the statistics are also capturing the other (unpaid) fun they have around the house like cleaning bathrooms, dusting, and vacuuming.

BEA has significantly expanded its global value chain statistics to help policymakers and the public better understand international supply chains. 

Global value chain statistics lay out the mix of domestic and imported value included in the cross-border production chains of goods and services. They are also known as statistics measuring trade in value added.

Build custom tables and charts from BEA's distribution of personal income statistics with BEA’s newest data analysis tool.

The Income Data Analysis Tool, or IDAT, launched today in conjunction with the latest release of BEA’s national distribution of personal income statistics. This tool allows users to explore BEA’s state and national distribution of personal income data by creating custom visualizations and tables based on income concepts, years, and income quantiles.

A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora

When my kids were younger, they always asked me how things are made. I usually didn’t know. My own dad’s playbook for these questions was saying “I forgot.” I guess I’ve forgotten a lot over the years, too. That said, understanding how things are made is critical to making them better, and ultimately to driving economic growth.

How much does research and development activity contribute to your state’s economy? How does that compare nationally? And how have R&D trends shifted across industries? To help answer these questions and more, the Bureau of Economic Analysis is updating and expanding R&D statistics introduced last year.

BEA has released a set of prototype statistics that help assess how households share in each state’s economic growth. The statistics, now available for 2022, show how personal income is distributed across each state’s households and provide metrics that can be used to study income inequality.

Statistics for every state and the District of Columbia were added today to BEA’s prototype statistics on the distribution of U.S. personal income. This provides a new tool for assessing how households share in each state’s economic growth. 

For example, the share of state personal income received by the top 20 percent of households in 2021 ranged from lows of 43.1 percent in Maine and 43.7 percent in Maryland to highs of 53.8 percent in Connecticut and 54.1 percent in Wyoming, according to the prototype statistics.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis updated its prototype measures of economic well-being and growth today and for the first time released open-source code that allows users to tailor the charts and tables to meet their needs. 

The prototype measures package some of BEA’s headline statistics with data from other statistical agencies to spotlight trends in well-being and the drivers of economic growth.

Today BEA is introducing new experimental data that map our health care estimates in gross domestic product to the framework of CMS’ National Health Expenditures Account, allowing researchers to get an earlier look at 2022 health care spending numbers. The experimental data show health care spending in 2022 rose to more than $4.3 trillion, while the share of GDP declined to 17.1 percent, from a 17.5 percent share in 2021.