Transcript Chicago Regional Meeting March 8-9, 2005

Remarks to the World Congress
May 12, 2008
Role of Official Statistics in a Modern Society:
A U.S. Perspective
Keith Hall
Commissioner
Bureau of Labor Statistics
What the future should bring
• The importance of services in our domestic and
international economy
• Challenges and gaps in the measurement of
services in the U.S. economy: Past, Present and
Future
• Globalization and future measurement
challenges
Services as a percent of U.S. GDP, 1960-2007
65
59%
60
55
50
41.4%
45
40
35
30
1960
1968
1976
1984
1992
2000
U.S. trade relative to GDP, 1960-2007
35
28.9%
30
25
20
15
9.5%
10
5
0
1960
1968
1976
1984
1992
2000
The growth in U.S. service sector
employment as a share of total U.S.
employment
100
90
80
70
60
62.4
64.1
67.5
1949
1959
1969
72.2
83.9
77.7
81
1989
1999
2007
50
40
30
20
10
0
1979
Change in payroll employment during
recessions, 1953-2001
53-54
57-58
60-61
69-70
73-75
80-80
81-82
90-91
00-01
1,000
500
0
-500
-1,000
-1,500
-2,000
-2,500
-3,000
Total nonfarm
Goods producing
Service providing
Import Penetration Ratio for Manufacturing and Exchange Rate Movements
(1975-2006)
30%
140
120
25%
100
20%
80
15%
60
10%
40
5%
20
0%
0
1979
1984
IPR
1989
1994
Trade Weghted Exchange Rate
1999
2004
• The Growing Contribution of Non-Manufacturing
Industries to U.S. Productivity:
Private Business
MFP
Contribution of
Non-manufacturing
• There
19901995
19952000
20002005
0.5
1.3
1.8
0.2
0.7
1.2
still may be measurement problems for many
industries, especially in finance, health care, education and
construction.
• New data have been coming on line and the situation may
be improving.
What the future should bring
• The importance of services in our domestic and
international economy
• Challenges and gaps in the measurement of
services in the U.S. economy: Past, Present and
Future
• Globalization and future measurement
challenges
Price indexes for domestically
produced services
• Coverage of domestically produced, in-scope
services in the BLS Producer Price Program has
been a real success story, although even today,
significant gaps in coverage remain.
In-scope services output covered
by PPI, 2001 to 2007
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
52.7
53.4
56.1
58.8
2001
2002
2003
2004
76.3
76.8
77.4
2005Jul
2006
2007
64.5
2005Jan
Percent of in-scope services output covered
Coverage of services
• Sectors with little or no coverage
–
–
–
–
Educational services
Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
Management of Companies and Enterprises
Other Services (Repair and Maintenance)
• Significant gaps within covered sectors
– Health Care and Social Assistance (office of dentists, continuing
care retirement communities, freestanding ambulatory surgical
and emergency centers )
– Finance and Insurance (credit card issuing and reinsurance)
– Professional services (computer systems design, research and
development)
– Administrative and Support Services (telemarketing bureaus)
Depth of Coverage of Services
• Service industry coverage:
– 571 service industries
– PPI publishes indexes representing :
• 100 service industries
• 125 retail and wholesale trade industries
• Planned increase in coverage of Wholesale Trade
– PPI publishes 2 aggregate indexes for merchant wholesale trade
– We plan to publish 18 wholesale trade 4 digit NAICS industries
on a post-stratified basis
• International coverage of services:
– We don’t have this as percent of output, just whether or not each
country has service industry indexes – wait for Bonnie’s email
FYI: CPI Services
• Measurement objective – average change over time in
the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket
of consumer purchased services.
• Weight of services in the CPI
ALL ITEMS
Services
100.000
58.731
• Price change CPI services vs. commodities 1998 – 2007
Services
+ 37.7%
Commodities + 20.3%
What the future should bring
• The importance of services in our domestic and
international economy
• Challenges and gaps in the measurement of
services in the U.S. economy: Past, Present and
Future
• Globalization and future measurement
challenges
Future challenges
• Capturing global movements of production and
labor
• Capturing price changes when production shifts
from being domestic to foreign sourced.
• The increasingly blurred distinction between
Wholesale Trade and Manufacturing resulting
from globalization trends