A blog post from BEA Director Vipin Arora
I’ve written in the past about how BEA’s supply and use tables are the unsung hero of economic accounting. They do a lot, including providing the framework for modern economic measurement and analysis. But did you know they are also central to understanding supply chains?
Supply and use tables can be viewed as a map of the economy. And just like a map of the United States shows how different states are connected through roads and highways, the supply-use tables show how different parts of the production process are connected through either the supply or use of specific goods and services. In other words, they are a snapshot of the economy’s supply chains.
Let me give a specific example. Suppose you want to better understand the supply chain for batteries. You could quickly go to BEA’s detailed use table for 2017 (the most recent year available for detailed data). In the Excel table, find the column for the “storage battery manufacturing” industry (column EK), which builds batteries such as those used for backup power supplies for homes and businesses. As you scroll down the column, you’ll see estimates for the value of goods and services used by that industry to produce those types of batteries.
Unsurprisingly, you’ll see that the storage battery industry depends heavily on metals—think copper, zinc, and nickel. It’s also easy to see that the supply chain needed to produce storage batteries includes many other commodities, such as plastics, rubber, and chemicals.
You can get a more resilience-focused perspective on supply chains from the supply table. It turns out the domestic storage battery industry isn’t the only game in town. Go to the detailed supply table and scroll down to the row for “storage battery manufacturing” (row 144). Moving across the row, you’ll see estimates for the value of storage batteries produced by a handful of other domestic industries that make smaller amounts of storage batteries. You’ll also see estimates for imported storage batteries. You can determine that about 53% of these batteries are produced domestically while around 47% are imported.
Hopefully that example can help you see the power of BEA’s supply and use tables and the key role they play in the understanding and analysis of supply chains.
Whether you’re tracing the inputs behind an industry’s production or exploring the range of industries that produce a product, these tables reveal the structure of modern supply chains.