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November, 2001, Vol. 124, No. 11

Industry output and employment projections to 2010

Jay M. Berman

Employment in the United States is projected to increase by 22.2 million over the 2000–10 period. Even though the growth (1.4 percent) is slightly slower than that experienced during the past decade, employment in the economy is expected to reach 167.8 million. Nonfarm wage and salary workers are expected to account for most of the projected employment gains, 152.5 million. Agricultural employment—including wage and salary workers, self-employed persons, and unpaid family workers—is projected to increase by 323,000. Nonfarm self-employed and unpaid family workers are also expected to increase—to 9.1 million—while private household wage and salary jobs are projected to decline by 226,000. (See table 1.)

Real output among industries is expected to expand by nearly $6.1 trillion between 2000 and 2010, to $22.3 trillion from $16.2 trillion.¹ The resulting average annual growth rate of 3.3 percent closely mirrors that experienced during the 1990–2000 period. Nearly 60 percent of total output growth will be attributed to the service-producing industries, where real output is expected to expand at about the same rate experienced during the past decade—3.4 percent—and reach $13.1 trillion by 2010. Real output growth in the goods-producing sector is projected to increase 3 percent annually, slightly slower than that of the 1990–2000 period. Although comprising just 1.8 percent of the economy’s total output, agriculture output is expected to grow at 1.9 percent annually, slightly lower than its previous 10-year growth rate. (See table 2.)

The aggregate picture of the economy for the year 2010 has labor force and gross domestic product growth remaining constant, while rising productivity rates continue to lead the way for output increases. Macroeconomic factors providing the foundation for the industry and output projections include the labor force and demographic changes, Government defense spending and tax policies, foreign economic activity, business investment decisions, personal consumption patterns, and aggregate productivity trends.²

This excerpt is from an article published in the November 2001 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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Footnotes
1 This article discusses gross duplicated output in real terms. Gross duplicated output measures not only GDP, or all final demand purchases of new goods and services, but also all new goods and services produced as intermediate goods for use in further production. Real output is measured as a 1996 based chain-weighted Fisher index. The real outputs of the industry do not add to their higher level aggregates because of chain weighting. For more information on chain-weighting, see Charles Steindel, "Chain-weighting: The New Approach to Measuring GDP," Current Issues in Economics and Finance, Federal Reserve Board of New York, December 1995, vol. 1 no. 9.

2 For further discussion of these factors, see Howard N. Fullerton, Jr., "Labor force projections to 2010; steady growth and changing composition," Monthly Labor Review, November 1999, pp. 19–32; and Norman C. Saunders and Betty Su, "The U.S. economy to 2008," Monthly Labor Review, November 1999, pp. 5–18.

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