Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2002 historical and annual revision

In late 2002, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published a revision to its index of industrial production and the related measures of capacity utilization. The primary feature of the revision was the reclassification back to 1972 of production and capacity indexes for individual industries from the Standard Industrial Classification System to the North American Industry Classification System. The revision also reflects the incorporation of newly available, more comprehensive source data, and it introduced improved methods for measuring the annual real output of communications equipment manufacturing. ; Along with the updating and the restatement of the data using the North American Industry Classification System, all production and capacity indexes are now expressed as percentages of output in 1997. The new information resulted in an upward revision to the rate of increase in industrial production and capacity from 1997 to 2000. For that period, the average rate of industrial capacity utilization is 0.7 percentage point higher than previously reported. The most recent business-cycle peak is still June 2000, at 116.2 percent of 1997, with the low being the fourth quarter of 2001. The rate of industrial capacity in the third quarter of 2002, at 76.2 percent, is essentially unchanged from previously reported data. The rate is more than 5 percentage points below its 1972-2001 average and about 3 percentage points below the trough in the 1990-91 recession but 5 percentage points above the trough in the 1982 recession.Industrial production index ; Industrial capacity

Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2000 annual revision

In late 2000, the Federal Reserve Board published the annual revision of its index of industrial production and related measures of capacity and utilization for the period January 1992 through October 2000. The updated measures reflect the incorporation of newly available, more comprehensive source data, the introduction of new production series, and changes in methods. For this revision, two new years of comprehensive data on manufacturing output became available; otherwise, the updating of the data was typical of annual revisions. ; Total industrial output has increased, on average, 5.1 percent per year since 1995, and industrial capacity has expanded 5.4 percent per year; these revised rates of increase are more rapid than those previously reported. The rate of industrial capacity utilization was little changed by the revision for the third quarter of 2000 but was revised up 0.6 percentage point, to 81.6 percent, for the fourth quarter of 1999.Industrial production index ; Industrial capacity

Using Cyber-enabled Transaction Data to Study Productivity and Innovation in Organizations

This paper draws on recent research in a wide variety of disciplines to identify the key elements necessary to build an empirical infrastructure that will advance research on one of the key building blocks of science and innovation policy: organizations. We argue that cyber-tools and new data will permit researchers to examine the innovation process |both successes and failures| and explore business performance and business dynamics at the level of the appropriate economic entity. We develop a roadmap that outlines how the new data can be developed, from harvesting the web to direct observation from deep within companies. The paper identifies a set of research questions and an approach whose pursuit could be used to develop a national research data infrastructure for the study of innovation and organizational performance. One key element of the approach is to identify and study innovation processes within organizations by collecting data on inputs and outcomes of innovation projects (or initiatives) within organizations. Another is the collection of representative data by business function/processes across firms, a proven statistical and economic approach (Sturgeon et al. 2006, Brown 2008, Lewin et al 2008). Finally, we argue that the work to develop new data from deep within firms should involve the participation of computer and information scientists. Opportunities for quasi experimental approaches to data collection, and noninvasive techniques to harvest data from within firms (i.e., auto-populating of researcher databases) need to be explored. More generally, the bringing together of scientists to consider business microdata privacy/access and data collection from organizations is itself significant, with potential for creating opportunities in a broad range of applications.

Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2001 annual revision

In late 2001, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published the annual revision of its index of industrial production and the related measures of capacity and capacity utilization for the period January 1992 to October 2001. The updated measures reflect the incorporation of newly available, more-comprehensive source data and the introduction of improved methods for compiling a few series. ; Measured fourth quarter to fourth quarter, increases in rates of industrial output and capacity have been revised downward from rates previously reported for 1999 and 2000. The revision places the decline in industrial output in 2001 at an annual rate of 6.0 percent. The estimated rate of increase in capacity in 2001 was lowered by 0.7 percentage point, to 1.7 percent. The rate of industrial capacity utilization as of the third quarter of 2001 was little changed by the revision; at 74.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2001, the rate is 4 percentage points below the nadir of the 1990-91 recession but 3 percentage points above that of the 1982 recession.Industrial production index ; Industrial capacity

Industrial production and capacity utilization: historical revision and recent developments

The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System has completed a revision of its measures of output, capacity, and capacity utilization for the industrial sector. The primary feature of the revision is a new formulation for aggregating the indexes and utilization rates based on weights that are updated annually rather than every five years. The new formulation has been used to revise the output, capacity, and utilization rates back to 1977. It provides more accurate current estimates of developments in industrial production and capacity utilization and eliminates an earlier, small overstatement of the growth trends of production and capacity. ; The revised indexes of industrial production and capacity show slower growth, on average, than the earlier estimates while the cyclical patterns of the revised measures are practically the same as before. Both from 1977 to 1987 and from 1987 to 1996, total industrial output grew at an average pace of about 2.3 percent a year--about 1/4 percentage point less than previously estimated. The growth of industrial capacity was revised down nearly as much; consequently, the rate of total industrial capacity utilization was revised down only a fraction of a percentage point at the end of 1996. (Statistical Release G.17, "Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization.")Industrial capacity ; Industrial productivity

Intangible Capital and Economic Growth

Published macroeconomic data traditionally exclude most intangible investment from measured GDP. This situation is beginning to change, but our estimates suggest that as much as $800 billion is still excluded from U.S. published data (as of 2003), and that this leads to the exclusion of more than$3 trillion of business intangible capital stock. To assess the importance of this omission, we add capital to the standard sources-of-growth framework used by the BLS, and find that the inclusion of our list of intangible assets makes a significant difference in the observed patterns of U.S. economic growth. The rate of change of output per worker increases more rapidly when intangibles are counted as capital, and capital deepening becomes the unambiguously dominant source of growth in labor productivity. The role of multifactor productivity is correspondingly diminished, and labor's income share is found to have decreased significantly over the last 50 years.