Business Statistics of the United States: Patterns of Economic Change is a comprehensive and practical collection of data that relects the nation’s economic performance since 1929. It provides up to 80 years of annual data in regional, demographic and industrial detail for key indicators such as:
- gross domestic product
- personal income
- spending
- saving
- employment
- unemployment
- the capital stock
- and more
Compiled in the midst of a dramatic downturn in the United States economy, the 14th edition provides an abundance of data enabling the user to understand the background of recent developments and compare today’s economy with past history. Of equal importance to the data are the introductory highlights and extensive notes for each chapter that help users to understand the data, use them appropriately, and, if desired, seek additional information from the sources agencies.
Business Statistics of the United States provides a rich and deep picture of the American economy and contains approximately 3,500 time series in all. The data are predominately from federal government sources including:
- Board of Governors of The Federal Reserve System
- Bureau of Economic Analysis
- Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Census Bureau
- Employment and Training Administration
- Energy Information Administration
- Federal Housing Finance Agency
- U.S. Department of the Treasury
In addition to updated data, the 14th edition features:
- A new series that shows Federal Reserve credit, the “Fed’s balance sheet,” which expanded to a startling degree in 2008 as the monetary authority used new tools to maintain and expand the flow of credit.
- Expanded data covering the Great Depression and World War II.
- New tables in Chapter 1 on shares of aggregate supply and final demand.
- Data on unemployment rates have been expanded to include three broader measures of labor underutilization calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A few facts found in Business Statistics of the United States
- The Consumer Price Index rose 3.5 percent from December 2007 to July 2008, and then fell 3.5 percent from July to December. Food prices rose throughout the year, while energy prices soared and then collapsed.
- Sales of cars and light trucks plunged 36 percent from December 2007 to December 2008. For the full year 2008, 13.1 million units were sold, down from the record high of 17.3 million units in 2000
- In 2005, 2.1 million housing units were started, the highest since 1972. By 2008, however, housing starts plunged to the lowest levels of their 50-year history.
- The rise in prices of existing homes sold and refinanced ended in 2007, as measured by the total Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) House Price Index. From the peak in the second quarter of 2007 through the fourth quarter of 2008, prices for this broad category of housing declined 4.6 percent.
Cornelia J. Strawser is the senior economic consultant to Bernan Press. She edited the seventh through thirteenth editions and was the co-editor of two previous editions of Business Statistics. She was co-editor of Foreign Trade of the United States, 2001, and also worked on the Handbook of U.S. Labor Statistics. She was formerly a senior economist for the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee and has also served at the Senate Budget Committee, at the Congressional Budget Office, and on the Federal Reserve Board staff. Her initial experience consisted of compiling and analyzing the Board's Index of Industrial Production. In subsequent positions, she specialized in critical analysis of incoming economic data and advice to policy makers on subjects such as the interpretation of the position of the economy relative to the business cycle, the interactions between monetary and fiscal policy and the economy, and issues of income growth, income distribution, and poverty. Currently, she continually monitors the press and new government data releases in order to keep Business Statistics up to date and relevant, and also on occasion contributes corrections of mis-stated economic data to major daily newspapers. She holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from George Washington University, both in economics.
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