BEA continually explores new statistics as part of its mission to provide Americans with a better understanding of the ever-evolving U.S. economy. Some of the topics we're working on:

Arts and Culture

There's no business like show business - but art museums, fashion design, and historic sites play special roles in the economy, too. The Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account measures the economic contributions of a wide range of arts and cultural activities: music groups, dance troupes, and theaters; natural parks, zoos, and all sorts of museums; interior design, graphic design, and photography; and much more. We also look at the industries that support them – broadcasting, publishing, filmmaking, and the manufacturing of cameras and musical instruments, for example.

The data about arts and culture and their supporting industries include their contributions to gross domestic product (GDP), as well as their output, employment, and compensation, both nationally and by state.

Health Care

Our health care statistics are about more than spending and economic growth. They also help Americans better understand the delivery of care that's essential to their well-being. To better measure spending trends and treatment prices, BEA developed a set of supplemental statistics called the Health Care Satellite Account. These statistics give policymakers, researchers, and the public another way of understanding the economics of health care.

This satellite account measures U.S. health care spending by the diseases being treated (for example, cancer or diabetes) instead of by the types of goods or services purchased (such as hospital or doctor's office visits). It also provides price indexes of treatments. At the same time, BEA continues to produce the traditional goods-and-services health care estimates that are part of our core statistics, such as GDP.

Outdoor Recreation

Boating and biking, camping and climbing, hunting and hiking - they're all part of the new Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account. We're digging deeper into the data on these activities to help natural resource managers, the outdoor recreation industry, policymakers, and the public understand the role of outdoor leisure pursuits in the economy.

The statistics feature the outdoor recreation industry's contributions to GDP. Other data include outdoor rec-related gross output, employment, and compensation for different types of industry, such as motor vehicle manufacturing. Data on gross output, a measure of sales or receipts, is produced for specific outdoor activities, such as biking, RVing, or snowboarding.

Travel and Tourism

Hitting the road for fun? Flying cross-country on business? Either way, you'll contribute to BEA's travel statistics. People follow the Travel and Tourism Satellite Account to get an industry update and for clues to the future of the larger economy.

The account measures how much visitors spend and the prices they pay for lodging, airfare, souvenirs, and other travel-related goods and services. These national statistics also provide a snapshot of employment in travel and tourism industries.

Digital Economy

The economic effects of online shopping, digital media, the sharing economy, and other e-commerce developments are captured within GDP and other BEA statistics. But you can't isolate the digital economy's contributions within these core accounts. The digital economy project is developing tools to measure the economic effects of fast-changing technologies, to calculate their contributions to GDP, and to understand their effects on global supply chains.

This project seeks to improve measures of high-tech goods and services, including valuing digital-enabling infrastructure, e-commerce transactions, and digital media, and to advance research into the sharing economy and free digital content.

Distribution of Personal Income

BEA is actively engaged in efforts to measure the distribution of personal income, researching the means, methods, and processes necessary to publish regular measures. BEA plans to release prototype measures within the 2020 calendar year, collect feedback on them, and refine methodology before finalizing a regular publication schedule. The current effort builds on at least a decade of BEA research and will offer insights into how American households share in overall economic growth.

Coastal Areas

Whether they're situated near the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic oceans or around the Great Lakes, the diverse coastal areas of the United States share some similar issues, such as maritime industries, natural resources, coastal development, and public access to the waters. Economic Information for Coastal Areas brings BEA's data about these states and counties together in one handy place.

Researching coastal economies? Want to know how much people living in coastal areas earn? This tool highlights personal income and industry earnings for coastal states and counties. Coastal states' GDP statistics are also included. It's a joint project with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which provided the definition for coastal areas.

Household Production

What's the value of unpaid work done in the home – things like cooking, cleaning, watching the kids, and so forth? Economists have long recognized the importance of such work. But these unpaid tasks aren't included in BEA' calculation of the nation's gross domestic product, partly because they can't be tracked through marketplace transactions. We researched the monetary value of this labor to create the Household Production Satellite Account, which estimates how much larger GDP would be if unpaid household tasks were included, and also shows trends in household work over time.

Going forward, we're exploring the feasibility of producing a set of household production statistics each year.

Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts

These tables provide a comprehensive picture of the U.S. economy, showing production, income, financial flows, and changes in net worth on the balance sheets of households, businesses, and governments.

The Integrated Macroeconomic Accounts were developed jointly with the Federal Reserve Board. They bring together data from BEA's National Income and Product Accounts and the Fed's Flow of Funds accounts, using consistent definitions, and present the information in a unified framework. This project fills information gaps and enhances the international comparability of U.S. statistics.

Integrated Industry-Level Production Account (KLEMS)

This is a rich data set for analyzing the sources of industries' growth (or decline) and how those sources affect growth across the U.S. economy. It's produced in collaboration with the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, integrating BEA's GDP by industry data with capital input and labor hours data from BLS.

The Integrated Industry-Level Production Account traces the sources of growth in GDP and output from their industry origins by examining changes in capital; labor; intermediate purchases of energy, materials, and services; and multifactor productivity.

Accounts of this nature are often referred to as "KLEMS" accounts after the broad categories of inputs that industries use in their production (K=capital, L=labor, E=energy, M=materials, and S=purchased services).