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The measurement of the output of the medical care system is necessary to assess the productivity levels and growth of a country's economy and medical care system. Medical price indexes have uses other than those involving output and productivity measurement. In the United States, both within the health sector and more generally, contracts occasionally contain provisions that depend on growth of the medical Consumer Price Index (CPI). The CPI and the Producer Price Index (PPI) are also employed in updating fee schedules for certain administered pricing schemes and payments to some health plans. This chapter reviews the measurement issues underlying the construction of medical care price indexes. It describes procedures employed by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in the construction of its medical CPIs and PPIs (including recent revisions and changes). It also discusses alternative notions of medical care output that involve the price of a treatment episode rather than the prices of fixed bundles of inputs. Finally, the chapter outlines salient features of a new price index for health expenditures.

This chapter argues that government in America became complex and large, requiring more varied types of information, just as did large commercial enterprises. It describes how three agencies used information: Bureau of the Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Bureau of Economic Analysis, followed by a discussion of how government used information in World War I and during the Great Depression. It includes a discussion of the role of public opinion surveys and the role of universities in creating and using information. Opinion surveys evolved into a complex form of information in the twentieth century that influenced profoundly how politicians and public officials functioned and in how people shaped their opinions about politics and government. American universities became massive creators of new information, while themselves expanding into large institutions. Growth in the size of public and private institutions and how they were able to create new bodies of information were linked to the attitudes people had toward information and to their increased reliance on information handling tools, such as telephones, books, and data processing equipment.

Productivity measurement has long been an important activity of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). This program has evolved over the years, stimulated by changes in data availability, by new developments in the economics literature, and by the needs of data users. This chapter discusses the current status of the BLS program, with emphasis on the data development work done in recent years. It first reviews the status of the BLS program as of the mid-1970s as well as some important advances in the economics literature that had occurred by that time. It then describes the development of multifactor productivity measures for the private business and private nonfarm business sectors—these were first published in 1983—and recent work to expand and improve these measures. It also describes recent extensions and improvements to measures for the manufacturing sector and for more detailed industries both within and outside manufacturing. Finally, it comments on the potential for further improvements in the measures.

Today, environmental health professionals assess hazards in the workplace or the outside air by comparing sampled levels against official Threshold Limit Values (TLV's). But before today's reliance on quantitative tools for correlating atmospheric chemical levels to disease, industrial health practices were neither primitive nor unscientific. Medical and scientific researchers wrote at once for physicians or hygienists and for those without scientific training. Their knowledge itself remained closely tied to preventive interventions as well to curative ones. A quantitative chemical approach to occupational disease took shape following World War I, with the advent of a new community of experts, centered in the public health schools, in company medical clinics and in state divisions of industrial hygiene.

This chapter presents an overview of the Business Employment Dynamics (BED) database at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It also provides a detailed analysis of job creation and destruction in the 2001 recession and the subsequent years. It is observed that the relatively few establishments with large gross job gains and large gross job losses were the drivers of the 2001 recession. The declining net employment growth during the first three quarters of 2001 can be attributed to both falling gross job gains and rising gross job losses. Moreover, 64 percent of the net job losses in the most severe recessionary quarter are attributable to the relatively few establishments gaining or losing 20 or more jobs. It can be concluded that the BLS was able to create the BED data with no new data collection efforts and with no new additional respondent burden.

This chapter outlines the key elements of the new architecture of the expanded and integrated U.S. national accounts. This system integrates the U.S. National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs) with the productivity statistics generated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and balance sheets produced by the Federal Reserve Board. This chapter also compares the NIPAs with the principal alternative, the international accounting guidelines in the System of National Accounts.

This introductory chapter discusses the coverage of this volume about the proposed new architecture of the U.S. national accounts and the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPAs). The chapters in this volume are from the proceedings of the conference “A New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts” held in Washington D.C. on April 16–17, 2004. This chapter describes the features of the new architecture and discusses the role of various government agencies including the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Labor, the Census Bureau and the Governors of the Federal Reserve System.

This chapter examines the similarities and differences between output measures produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It describes framework for the production account that incorporates data on the production of commodities by individual industries, as well as the interindustry flows available in the input-output accounts. This chapter analyzes theoretical foundation for a production account that can be used to analyze productivity and shows the relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and the major-sector estimates using the production account framework.

This chapter discusses the panelists' opinion on the outcome of the Conference on a New Architecture for the U.S. national accounts. They all agree that the conference has accomplished the objective of initiating the lengthy process that will be required to produce an integrated and consistent system of U.S. national accounts. But they also acknowledged that the completion of the integration process will require collaboration between the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to integrate he components of the core system of accounts and between the BEA and the Federal Reserve Board on integrated and consistent income and expenditures, capital, and wealth accounts.

This chapter proposes an econometric procedure that assigns a virtual price and contrasts it to other procedures. Imputation of missing prices can be done implicitly or explicitly. Missing prices can be explicitly imputed by “carrying forward” the last recorded price. Sufficient conditions for constructing a price index by taking unit values either across outlets or across items with a particular brand do not hold for the cereal market in New York. Obviously neither the items within a brand nor the outlets are complements. The cereal market does not have the characteristics that are enough for a price index that employs unit values to be a true price index. At least in the cereal market, it seems that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) imputation method produces indexes with relatively smaller variances and whose results are close in magnitude to the indexes based on the economic approach.

This chapter describes the normal daily routines that bishops follow and compares their averages (in terms of hours spent sleeping and working) to those of other American males in their same age category. Analysis is also made of the amount of time that they spend praying and exercising each day. Some interesting results come to the fore such as the fact that bishops sleep two hours less per day and work two hours more per day than men their own age. We also delve into their preferences for both secular and Church news sources, noting (not surprisingly) that the more traditional bishops choose conservative outlets and the more progressive ones choose liberal sources.