Industry productivity trends under the North American Industry Classification system

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 127, Issue 11, 2004, Pages 31-41

  Russell, Matthew ^a   Takac, Paul ^a   Usher, Lisa ^a  

^a BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 20444441140     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (16)

1. Productivity and cost measures for 180 mainly four-digit NAICS industries were first released on September 18, 2003. Since that time the Bureau has revised and updated the measures for many industries and added measures for more than 300 additional industries at the six-, five-, three-, and two-digit NAICS level.
2. Executive Office of the President (1998), North American Industry Classification System, United States, 2002, Washington, DC, U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Copies of the manual can be obtained from the National Technical Information Service (NTIS) on the Internet at www.ntis.gov/products/ bestsellers/naics.asp.
3. For more information about the NAICS structure, see the Bureau of the Census on the Internet at http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html.
4. Joseph P. Goldberg and William T. Moye, The First Hundred Years of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bulletin 2235 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, September 1985), pp. 169, 203, and 249.
5. For example, output measures based on the deflated value of output were adopted for most industries (made possible by the expansion in coverage of producer price indexes during the 1980s and 1990s). Previously, a large number of industries were based on physical quantity of output. The expansion of the Bureau's industry productivity series was also accompanied by a decision to use BLS employment and hours data from the Current Employment Statistics survey for measuring labor input for all manufacturing industries, rather than using Census data for some industries as had been done in the past
6. Industry employment and hours data from the BLS Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey were converted to a NAICS basis by the Bureau's Office of Employment and Unemployment Statistics with the release of May 2003 data in June 2003. CES industry employment and hours data were converted to NAICS back to 1990 for most industries, and to earlier years for some industries. The Office of Productivity and Technology extrapolated these estimates back to 1987 for many industries.
7. Slightly less than half of the six-digit NAICS industries included in the industry productivity database are industries that are direct matches to comparable SIC industries. More than half of the mining and wholesale trade industries, and almost half of the manufacturing industries, were direct matches to the SIC industries. For other sectors, less than half the industries covered were direct matches.
8. Recent work by researchers at the Bureau of the Census and the Federal Reserve Board has attempted to assign historical records of individual manufacturing establishments from each of the quinquennial Censuses of Manufactures for 1963 through 1992 to NAICS industries. These recoded data are used to calculate new conversion ratios that reflect the changing relationship between SIC and NAICS shipments in those years. Kimberly Bayard and Shawn Klimek, "Creating a Historical Bridge for Manufacturing between the Standard Industrial Classification System and the North American Industry Classification System." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association, San Francisco, August 2003.
9. Executive Office of the President (1998), North American Industry Classification System...
10. Mark Sherwood, "Problems in Measuring Service Industry Output," Monthly Labor Review, March 1994, pp. 11-19
11. Some industry detail has been collapsed or discontinued under NAICS in the BLS Current Employment Statistics data. In addition, some six-digit manufacturing industry detail will be collapsed in the 2003 Annual Survey of Manufactures data from the Bureau of the Census.
12. Productivity measures are available through 2001 for detailed manufacturing industries, although measures for total manufacturing and for durable and non-durable manufacturing are available for later years. Productivity series are available through 2003 for wholesale trade, retail trade, and food service and drinking places industries. For all other industries covered, productivity measures are available through 2002.
13. Percentages represent the proportion of paid employees in the sector that are in the industries covered by the productivity indexes, as measured in the BLS Current Employment Statistics establishment survey. The percentage of proprietors and unpaid family workers covered by the productivity measures is not explicitly included in the ratios of employment coverage, but assumed to be the same as for paid employees.
14. Industries with labor productivity measures in the accommodation and food services sector represent 99.5 percent of employment in the sector.
15. This article focuses on published industries at the mainly three- and four-digit NAICS level. Indexes and rates of change in output per hour, output per worker, output, hours, all workers, labor compensation, and unit labor costs for these industries are available from the BLS Productivity and Costs Web site on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/lpc/home.htm. Comparable productivity and cost measures for NAICS five- and six-digit industries, as well as underlying data on the number of employees, total industry hours, and the value of net production for published and unpublished industries are available upon request by sending E-mail to dipsweb@bls.gov, or by calling the Division of Industry Productivity Studies (202-691-5618). SIC-based industry data also are available on the BLS Web site or by request. Historical productivity and related series for three- and four-digit SIC industries through 2000 will continue to be maintained, but will no longer be updated.
16. Five of the eight industries with declines in labor compensation were in textile manufacturing.