BEA's preliminary strategic plan for 2001-2005

Survey of Current Business, Dec, 2001 by J. Steven Landefeld

Improving estimating methods and processing systems and interfaces.--This element will focus on improving estimating methodologies, designing and developing interactive software tools for accessing data, expanding integrated software applications to produce industry estimates, and developing processing systems to improve efficiency.

Regional accounts.--BEA produces estimates of quarterly and annual State personal income, annual county and metropolitan area personal income, annual GSP, wages and employment in varying degrees of detail by industry for each area, and regional input-output multipliers. The Strategic Plan identifies the following areas for improvement.

Accelerating the release of regional estimates.--This project would provide the users of regional data with dramatically earlier access to these estimates. For example, the time lag for the release of GSP estimates would be reduced from 18 months down to 5 months after the reference year. Similar accelerations would be achieved for metropolitan and local area personal income.

Continually improving methodologies.--The methodologies used to produce the regional estimates must be updated and improved to keep pace with changes in the national and regional economies. Topics that need to be addressed are the estimation of stock options on a regional basis and the redefinition of the BEA Economic Areas to reflect new metropolitan area definitions.

Improving source data.--In order to improve the quality of the regional estimates, it is necessary to identify, develop, and implement new and more appropriate source data. For example, new source data would be needed to develop estimates of capital stocks by State.

Source data improvement.--BEA obtains most of its source data from other Federal Government agencies--primarily the Bureau of the Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Department of the Treasury, especially the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Therefore, it is imperative that BEA staff at all levels work with their colleagues in those agencies to upgrade the economic accounts by improving the relevance, quality, and timeliness of existing source data, by identifying untapped but potentially useful existing data, and by developing new data.

The following key data sources are the focal points of BEA's efforts to work with its partner agencies to improve source data for the economic accounts. (Many of these improvements are also mentioned in the listings of the various BEA program areas.)

Bureau of Labor Statistics data.--BLS employment and price data are essential ingredients of BEA's economic accounts. To improve its national, industry, and regional accounts, BEA will work with BLS to expand their Current Employment Statistics (790 program) to cover earnings of all employees. BEA will also work with BLS to explore expanding the coverage of the earnings concept to cover all types of earnings, including employee stock options, and benchmarking the earnings data to the BLS Covered Employment and Wages (ES-202) program. For its national accounts, BEA will work with BLS to improve the Producer Price Index program to provide quality-adjusted price indexes for high-tech goods and to continue expanding the coverage of financial and non financial services and of nonresidential construction.