Digging into Construction Data
Jeff Crawford
NABE Teleconference
April 8, 2010
www.bea.gov
Private Fixed Investment in structures
▪ Useful references on www.bea.gov
 How BEA Accounts for investment in Private
Structures by Paul Lally

Survey of Current Business (February 2009)
 Measuring the Economy: A Primer on GDP
and National Income and product Accounts
 http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm
www.bea.gov
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Construction Statistics in the NIPAs

Fixed Investment
 Private investment in structures and
equipment and software. Also government
investment
▪ Fixed Assets
 Statistics for net stock, investment, depreciation,
other changes in volume of assets
▪ GDP by Industry
 Industry composition of U.S, economy by value
added (Gross output minus intermediate inputs)
www.bea.gov
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Finding Fixed Investment Data
▪ From BEA homepage www.bea.gov
▪ Interactive data tables
 Interactive Tables
 National Economic Data
 National income and product accounts
Choose a table from a list of All NIPA Tables
5 - Saving and Investment
www.bea.gov
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Investment in structures
 Investment in Structures is measured
mainly as the sum of the costs of inputs of all
construction “put in place” during the accounting
period. Included are:
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www.bea.gov
Costs of materials installed or erected
Costs of labor and the cost of construction equipment rental
Cost of architectural and engineering work
Overhead and office costs incurred by the projects owners
Interest and taxes paid during construction
Contractors’ profit
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Other expenditures in private investment
 Brokers’ commissions on the sale of new and
used structures
 Net purchases of used structures from
government
 Improvements to structures
 Mining exploration, shafts and wells
 Other investment (mobile structures,
manufactured homes)
www.bea.gov
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Residential Investment
 In NIPA, home ownership is treated as a
business analogous to rental housing.
 Housing services of owner-occupants is
represented by imputed rent in personal
consumption expenditures (PCE).
 Imputed rental income for owner-occupants
is add to rental income of persons
www.bea.gov
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“Real” – Inflation adjusted quantity measures
 Deflation: for most components the current
dollar measure is divided by appropriate
price index
 Direct valuation: quantity measure is
multiplied by a base period price.
www.bea.gov
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Price Indexes
▪ BEA uses a variety of price measures from
the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and trade sources.
▪ A longstanding goal has been to use,
when possible, price measures that have
been adjusted for quality changes
www.bea.gov
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Input price indexes
▪ Because of the heterogeneity of construction projects,
structures have historically been priced by their inputs.
▪ Input price index do not account for material or labor
substitution and productivity gains
▪ For hospitals, the Turner Construction Company
building cost index (an input cost measure) is
combined with the single-family houses index to
capture some of the effects of productivity gain
www.bea.gov
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Output price indexes
▪ Output price indexes capture the effect of
changing productivity
▪ Census Bureau new single-family house index
▪ BLS Nonresidential building construction sector
indexes
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Warehouse building
School building
Office building
Industrial building
 http://www.bls.gov/ppi/ppinrbc.htm
www.bea.gov
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