Monday, November 17, 2008

Industrial Production Facts

Related to my prior post, I want to provide some definitions to help with understanding the data provided by the Federal Reserve Statistical Release.

What does the Industrial Production index cover?

The industrial production (IP) index measures the real output of the manufacturing, mining, and electric and gas utilities industries.

Manufacturing consists of those industries included in the North American Industry Classification System, or NAICS, definition of manufacturing plus those industries–logging and newspaper, periodical, book and directory publishing–that have traditionally been considered to be manufacturing and included in the industrial sector.


Where does the data come from?
On a monthly basis, the individual indexes of industrial production are constructed from two main types of source data: (1) output measured in physical units and (2) data on inputs to the production process, from which output is inferred. Data on physical products, such as tons of steel or barrels of oil, are obtained from private trade associations and from government agencies; data of this type are used to estimate monthly IP wherever possible and appropriate. Production indexes for a few industries are derived by dividing estimated nominal output.

All of the juicy details are here.

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