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Distributive Services in the U.S. Economic Accounts

1 Distributive services industries such as wholesale trade and retail trade have contributed significantly to productivity growth in the U.S. nonfarm business sector during the past decade. Bosworth and Triplett found that retail trade alone contributed nearly one-half to the acceleration of multifactor productivity growth in the late 1990's. At the same time, they expressed concern that productivity growth for these industries may be overstated because of the way real output is measured, especially for retail stores that sell computers and electronic devices whose quality continues to improve while prices fall. Different output concepts, data sources, and methodologies have led researchers to reach different conclusions about the sources of productivity growth and its attribution among industries. Questions have also been raised about whether the current treatment of trade industries could lead to an overstatement of overall economic growth. Distributive services play an important role in the U.S. economy by bringing together buyers and sellers and by facilitating the movement of domestic and imported goods from producers to consumers. The industries that provide these services-wholesale trade, retail trade, and transportation and warehousing-account for about 15 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), 18 percent of total employment, and, in 2004, contributed nearly 20 percent to real GDP growth. Despite recent improvements in the overall accuracy and consistency of data in BEA's integrated annual industry accounts, interpreting the contributions of these industries to output and productivity growth is difficult because of a lack of consensus on output concepts for both nominal and real output, limitations in the source data used for measuring price indexes, and some uncertainty among researchers about how margin-type activities are treated in the U.S. economic accounts. Finally, the composition of these industries has changed as a result of the recent conversion of industry data to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS), which affects the consistency of time series data. This paper sheds some light on these issues by focusing on the largest and the most visible of the three sectors-retail trade-to identify and address the key measurement issues and to explain the treatment of margin activities in the economic accounts. The first part of the paper of BEA for helpful comments. Special thanks go to Anna Jacobson and Gabriel Medeiros for providing unpublished data from BEA's Annual Industry Accounts.-2-provides an overview of how margin-type industries are defined and classified under NAICS and it also discusses alternative output measures …