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Craig Howell and Harry Briggs
Prices received by domestic producers of finished goods moved up 0.2 percent in 1993, following a 1.6-percent advance in 1992 and a dip of 0.1 percent in 1991. The increase in the index for finished goods other than foods and energy, which includes consumer goods such as passenger cars and apparel as well as capital equipment such as trucks and machine tools, continued to slow in 1993. After gains of 2.0 percent in 1992 and 3.1 percent in 1991, this measure rose only 0.4 percent in 1993. In addition, the energy goods index, chiefly gasoline, home heating oil, and residential gas and electricity, decreased 3.8 percent, far more than its slight decline in the previous year, but not as much as its slump of 9.6 percent following Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Prices for foods such as meats, bread, and fresh produce, however, increased 2.4 percent in 1993, after a smaller climb in 1992 and a drop in 1991. (See table 1.)
The intermediate Goods Price Index, which measures the movement of prices for goods such as flour, steel, lumber, industrial chemicals, diesel fuel, and paper boxes, advanced 1.0 percent in 1993, the same as during the previous year. The Crude Goods Price Index, which measures price movements for items such as wheat, scrap metals, logs, crude petroleum, and cotton, moved down 0.5 percent following an increase of 3.3 percent in 1992. In 1993, prices for food-related materials were up but energy items were down in the intermediate and crude stages. Prices for intermediate goods other than foods and energy rose 1.6 percent over the year, somewhat more than in 1992, while basic industrial material prices climbed 11.6 percent, about twice as much as in 1992.
This excerpt is from an article published in the May 1994 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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