PRICES & SPENDING • Jul 2017 • Volume 6 / Number 10
Nailing down the price of new nonresidential building construction: expanding the PPI to include indexes by region and type of contractor
In the early 2000s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Producer Price Index (PPI) program began developing price indexes to cover the new nonresidential construction segment of the U.S. economy. This event was precipitated by feedback from industry analysts, economic agencies, and trade associations indicating that there was a lack of regularly available construction data based on a clearly defined methodology.
Read full article » | Download PDF
Recent articles
Hispanic household spending in 2015
Although the Hispanic population has grown more slowly in recent years, it still exerts a powerful influence on the U.S. economy. Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) data show that, in 2015, households with a reference person of Hispanic or Latino origin were 13 percent of the sample, compared with 12.2 percent in 2010 and 10.6 percent in 2005
Download PDF
How pay and benefits change as job level rises: data from the National Compensation Survey
This Beyond the Numbers article examines pay and benefits by job level to provide additional context to the nature of compensation among private sector workers in the United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) National Compensation Survey (NCS) is the key source of data on the pay and benefits of workers in the United States. The NCS uses data on employer costs for a variety of compensation components to produce the Employer Cost Index (ECI) and Employer Cost of Employee Compensation (ECEC) on a quarterly basis. The ECI provides an index of changes in the employer’s cost of wages and compensation from the prior quarter and prior year. The ECEC provides estimates of wages and salaries as well as average cost of benefits per hour worked, shown in dollars and cents.
Download PDF
The cost of care: new insights into healthcare spending growth
BLS is celebrating the first anniversary of experimental disease-based price indexes, which adjust expenditures on disease for inflation. Statistical agencies have long collected price information on medical procedures, drugs, equipment, and services, but the cost of treating a patient is typically some combination of these goods and services. This article examines the reasons for reporting by disease rather than by service and explains the reasons behind the spending growth for each disease.
Download PDF
