Looking Ahead To Comprehensive GDP Benchmark Revisions

Thursday sees the third release for Q2 GDP land alongside the five-yearly comprehensive benchmark revision to the US national income and product accounts (NIPAs), impacting both the level and changes in GDP and GDI (more from the BLS here and here).

• GDP: Current-dollar measures of GDP and related components will be revised from 1Q13 through 1Q23, whilst current-dollar GDP by industry statistics will be revised from 1Q05 through 1Q23 although revisions prior to 1Q13 will be offsetting across industries within each period.
• GDI: GDI and select income components will be revised from 1Q79 through 1Q23. It will be interesting to see whether these revisions close some of the historically wide gap between the two measures – see chart.
• Deutsche Bank on the new source data: “Several new features could impact the level of GDP and GDI – namely, recording of the Fed's monetary interest payments, improved estimates of brokers' commissions on the sale of existing homes, investment in own account software, and improved measures of housing services.”
• Output and price measures will use 2017 as the reference year, versus 2012 currently. Updating the reference year alone will not affect the percent changes in the price or quantity indexes (or in the chained-dollar estimates).
• Instead, revisions to the percent changes in NIPA aggregates will reflect the incorporation of newly available and revised source data and changes in methodologies.
• The 2018 revisions for example made revisions to various series going back around a century, but showed unchanged average annual growth in 2012-17, with a big retrospective jump in household savings over that period.
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