BLS completes major expansion of industry productivity series

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 121, Issue 9, 1998, Pages 35-43

  Duke, John ^a   Usher, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0347653385     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (8)

1. These industries are defined in the Standard Industrial Classification Manual: 1987 (Office of Management and Budget).
2. See the most recent annual bulletin, Productivity Measures for Selected Industries, BLS Bulletin 2491 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 1997).
3. The increase in the industries and products covered by the BLS Industrial Prices and Price Indexes program during the 1980s and early 1990s was particularly helpful. From 1980 to the early 1990s, the percentage of the value of shipments of manufactured products covered directly by Producer Price Indexes jumped from around 50 percent to well over 80 percent. Improvements in price coverage were made in nonmanufacturing industries as well.
4. Standard Industrial Classification Manual: 1987.
5. Productivity and related data through 1996 for all 20 two-digit manufacturing industries are available from the Bureau's Division of Productivity Research.
6. Many conceptual problems exist in the development of productivity data for service producing industries. See Mark Sherwood, "Difficulties in the measurement of service outputs," Monthly Labor Review, March 1994, pp. 11-19.
7. An industry was judged reliable if the standard deviation of its annual productivity changes was less than 10.0 and it had 10,000 or more employees for mining and manufacturing industries, or 50,000 or more employees for all other industries.
8. The productivity Web site is 〈http://stats.bls.gov/iprhome.htm〉. Also available are indexes and rates of change for output per employee and employees. The data in these files extend back to 1987. For industries with previously published series, additional files contain data that go back to earlier years, in many cases to 1958, and to 1947 in a few cases.