Preview of the 2003 Comprehensive Revision of the National Income and Product Accounts Statistical Changes

N December 10, 2003, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will release the results of the 12th comprehensive, or benchmark, revision of the national income and product accounts (NIPAs). The last such revision was released in October 1999. This article, which describes statistical changes, is the fourth in a series of SURVEY OF CURRENT BUSINESS articles about the comprehensive revision. An article in the January 2003 issue described the effects of incorporating the 1997 benchmark input-output (I-O) accounts and identified some of the proposals being considered for this comprehensive revision.1 An article in the June 2003 issue described major changes in definitions and classifications that will be introduced as part of this comprehensive revision.2 An article in the August 2003 issue described the new and redesigned tables that will be presented as part of the comprehensive revision.3 The results of the comprehensive revision will be released in December 2003 and an article in the January 2004 SURVEY will describe the revised NIPA estimates, discuss the effects of the definitional and statistical changes, and present the new tables. Statistical changes are changes in estimation procedures that are generally made to incorporate new methods or techniques or to incorporate data from new sources; an example is the adoption of chain-type indexes in the 1996 comprehensive revision, so that the growth rate of real gross domestic product (GDP) and its components became invariant to the choice of reference period.4 Other statistical changes address data gaps and other shortcomings; an example is the adoption of the Census Bureau’s annual Government