Director's Blog

A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora

I’ve always thought that a good analogy for the way we develop our economic estimates at BEA is how a master watchmaker constructs a watch. The watchmaker starts with a blueprint for the design of the watch, just as we begin with the methods of our world-leading economic accounts. Based on that design, the watchmaker carefully selects and assembles the components of the watch. Similarly, BEA’s economists meticulously select high-quality source data and compile them within a rigorous economic accounting framework to develop our estimates. In both cases, the individual components are transformed into something collectively meaningful.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

During the 1920s, Americans began investing more abroad than other countries were investing in the United States. This marked an important shift in U.S. foreign investment, and reversed the pattern seen before World War I. Around the same time, BEA began producing direct investment statistics—both U.S. direct investment abroad, or USDIA, and foreign direct investment in the United States, or FDIUS. Our experience measuring this part of the global economy is as keenly important today as it was back then.

A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora

A friend of mine recently went on vacation just to drive fast cars on a professional racetrack. Swiping through endless pictures, my friend waxed lyrical about each car’s acceleration. I share his enthusiasm to go faster—for different reasons. I crunch numbers for a living, so when I hear acceleration, I think about how BEA can deliver the world’s most timely economic statistics even quicker.

A blog post 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.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

In the alphabet soup of BEA acronyms, you’ve probably heard of GDP (gross domestic product). You might have heard of PCE (personal consumption expenditures, a fancy word for consumer spending). And you may have come across DPI (disposal personal income). But have you ever heard of RIMS II?

A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora

An old boss of mine was fond of a BEA product that many of our users don’t know about—regional price parities (RPPs). He said regional price parities are BEA’s most underappreciated statistic. While I love all our products equally—just like I love all my kids equally—I can’t help but agree that the RPPs are a gem that sometimes gets overlooked. I hope you won’t overlook the new RPP data coming Thursday, Dec. 12.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

BEA’s price index for personal consumption expenditures—the PCE price index—gets a lot of attention when it’s released every month. For good reason: the Federal Reserve and policymakers around the world rely on it as a key inflation gauge. Still, I can’t help comparing it to the quarterback of a football team. Just like the quarterback often seems to be in the spotlight, the same is true for the PCE price index. And just like there are 10 other offensive players on the field who work with the quarterback, we have many other price measures at BEA that complement the PCE price index and work together to paint the economic picture for our country.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

The first time a friend handed me a Rubik’s Cube I thought it would be easy to solve. I was wrong. BEA’s estimates of businesses’ inventories sometimes remind me of that experience. They seem relatively simple at first, but they turn out to be more complicated than expected. The good news is that, just like we can learn to solve a Rubik’s Cube with a few rules of thumb, we can understand BEA’s estimates of the change in private inventories with some basic principles.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

When I hear the phrase “personal income,” I think about my paycheck. When we talk about personal income in the context of BEA’s economic statistics, however, it’s my paycheck, your paycheck, your cousin’s paycheck—and much more. In fact, I believe our monthly personal income statistics are the most comprehensive measure of U.S. economic activity available on a monthly basis. They are also a widely used tool for analyzing consumer purchasing power.

A blog from BEA Director Vipin Arora

BEA’s supply-use tables may be the unsung hero of economic accounting.

For many, that description immediately brings to mind images of some well-known superhero sidekicks. Yet when I take a step back and think about the impact of supply-use tables, I am reminded of something else entirely: shipping containers.