Satellite Accounts - General

Brick and mortar retailers spent $484 billion providing “free” shopping experiences in 2016. For example, vehicle dealerships provide “free” test drives, book stores provide “free” book signings and grocery stores provide “free” food samples. To capture the value of “free” shopping experiences, the paper models them as an implicit barter transaction of shopping experiences for sales attention. The paper then modifies previously created productivity accounts for the wholesale and retail sector (Jorgenson, Ho and Samuels 2016) to include shopping experiences as a new industry output and sales attention as a new industry input.

Despite the rise of e-commerce, “free” brick and mortar shopping experiences grew faster than overall retail margins after 2002. Furthermore, brick and mortar stores have dramatically increased service speed since 2002. Between 2002 and 2014, better shopping experiences contributed $110 billion to real industry output growth and faster service speed subtracted $78 billion from real industry input growth. Furthermore, slower service speed between 1947 and 2002 increases real industry input growth and decreases productivity growth for that time period. Combining all these modifications together, the post-2002 wholesale and retail productivity slowdown shrinks from 0.98 percentage points per year to only 0.08 percentage points per year.

On December 5, 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released, for the first time, prototype estimates from the new Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA). In this satellite account, we used an input-output (I-O) framework to conduct an in-depth analysis of the arts and cultural sector's contributions to current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP).

Culture can be defined in a variety of ways to include language, traditions, beliefs, and values. For this new account, we defined arts and cultural production to be largely consistent with definitions used by the United Nations and the European Union. The I-O framework provides the necessary tools to identify and then estimate the value of the "creative chain" associated with arts and cultural production. This chain captures the economic value as we move from the creation of a cultural product (composing a symphony) to its production (the performance being recorded in a studio), then the distribution (by various modes), and finally the consumption (by the listener). In this paper, we explore the processes and methods used to identify and estimate the value of arts and cultural production, including key findings that enable us to quantify the impact of arts and culture on GDP for the first time.