A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora
We use the word “granular” a lot at BEA. It’s not a term that comes up much in day-to-day conversation elsewhere. When I first started hearing it here regularly, I always pictured salt. As in granulated salt. That isn’t crazy—apparently granularity first entered the English language in the 17th century to describe texture. It’s slowly evolved to mean level of detail, which is how we use it at BEA when referring to statistics. For that reason, for me references to granularity now evoke images of BEA users who want more detailed data. And I’ve got good news to share on that front.
Let’s start with last year. In July 2025, we expanded coverage of our international services trade statistics to 237 countries and areas. This major expansion in detail—an increase of 147 countries and areas—is something users have sought for many years.
Around the same time, we improved our data on global value chains by launching a new data tool for statistics on trade in value-added. The tool enables users to build more detailed tables to explore export-oriented data, including the mix of domestic and foreign content used to produce goods and services exported by U.S. industries. We also published new, more granular experimental statistics on quarterly consumer spending by state in May 2025.
We’ve got exciting plans for 2026 as well. For starters, we’re working to produce experimental statistics on international trade in services by state. Estimates are currently available for the nation but not individual states. The same is true for estimates of private fixed investment by state and government spending by state. Our work in this area is progressing to provide federal spending by state, and the next step is to publish experimental estimates of state and local government spending by state.
We’ll also provide even more detailed global value chain data in 2026. To date, trade in value-added statistics have only been available for U.S. exports. We plan to expand to other categories of final demand, such as consumption, investment, government spending, and imports. In addition, our New Foreign Direct Investment in the United States statistics will provide even more detail than in past years because we’ve improved our method to protect confidentiality.
That’s a lot. And we’ll continue looking for ways to improve the quality of our economic statistics by making them more granular.