Impact of 2008 Federal Budget on the Availability and Quality of Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis

The FY 2008 Consolidated Appropriations Act provides $77.2 million in funding to the Bureau of Economic Analysis for the fiscal year that began on October 1, 2007. To meet the FY 2008 funding level, BEA is taking the following programmatic reductions:

Discontinue developing statistics in 2008 for the research and development (R&D) satellite account.
Raise reporting thresholds and reduce the level of detail collected in BEA’s surveys of the operations of multinational corporations in the U.S.
Eliminate the survey of new direct investment in U.S. companies by foreign companies (BEA will continue to collect data on total direct investment flows, but will no longer be able to distinguish investments in existing companies from “Greenfield” and other new investments).
Eliminate the Benchmark Capital Flow Tables, which provide baseline data on industry by industry investment by type of investment.
Reduce county industry detail from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) subsector level to the sector level.
Eliminate the reconciliation of IRS taxable income and BEA’s personal income and annual table showing personal taxes on the basis of liabilities.
Eliminate production of GDP statistics on a seasonally-unadjusted basis.

BEA recognizes that reduction or elimination of any of its statistics is not desirable for its data users. Careful consideration has been given to which statistical programs should be reduced in an effort to make these changes as unproblematic as possible. BEA, will however, continue to produce all of its core programs. Three criteria are used to determine which programs are core: (1) statistics that feed into the estimation of gross domestic product and related statistics, (2) statistics required by law, or (3) statistics required for the administration of Federal programs. For FY 2008, BEA will maintain the integrity of the GDP and related core programs and continue to provide timely, accurate and relevant economic accounts data to inform the decisions made by government officials, business leaders, and individual households.