Industry Accounts

Resources moving from less productive to more productive sectors can increase aggregate output without any underlying change in production technology, yet the impact of these reallocations is challenging to measure because it involves measuring unobserved counterfactual production where resources have not moved. We construct measures of counterfactual production by implementing an Industry-Level Production Account with a tiers structure. Aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) and total factor productivity growth constructed bottom-up from the micro- (industry) level captures the true data-generating process for the sources of growth. The counterfactual accounts employ restrictions that impose a constraint that reallocating outputs and inputs have no impact on aggregate production, so that the difference between the two measures captures the economic impact of reallocations. We find that reallocations contributed 0.30 percent per year on average out of total GDP growth of 2.39 percent per year from 1987–2018. Almost all of this can be accounted for as reallocations of value added within manufacturing (for example, to the computer producing sector from other manufacturing sectors) and across sectors to the information and trade sectors.

This paper translates research and development expenditure data organized based on the Frascati Manual for the U.S. to a measure of gross output consistent with The System of National Accounts 1993. A set of detailed tables translates U.S. survey data on the performance of R&D from the National Science Foundation for 2001.

This paper provides a framework for translating research and development expenditure data organized based on the Frascati Manual to a measure of gross output consistent with The System of National Accounts 1993. This translation sets up the output measures and sectoral framework for the capitalization of R&D expenditures in a Satellite Account.

This paper is part of a series that provides the details behind the Bureau of Economic Analysis's (BEA) satellite account on research and development (R&D) activity. It describes the data and experimental methodology used to create the GDP-by-Industry component of the satellite account for thirteen R&D-intensive industries and an aggregation of all other for-profit industries.