Retail control method

A method used by BEA to prepare nonbenchmark-year and quarterly estimates for most components of personal consumption expenditures (PCE) for goods. The retail control method provides the indicator series that are used in interpolating and extrapolating the estimates for most PCE goods components, and it provides the aggregate indicator of the period-to-period change for this group of components. In this method, data on sales by kind of business from annual and monthly retail trade surveys are allocated among these PCE categories (known as the PCE control group) based on product-line data from the economic census. The detailed component estimates are then scaled so that they aggregate to the PCE control group’s period-to-period change.