While numerical data can seem dry, it is what drives decision-making by policymakers that respond to and act on individuals’ lives. The US Census Bureau’s Economic Indicators is the enumeration of homeownership, manufactured goods, wholesale inventories and international trade, amongst others. Scholars needing to understand economic trends come here or sign up for RSS feeds or email updates to get this important intelligence.
The user can glance at the economic picture of America by just viewing the first page. With icons and words, the topics are articulated, then the release date of the latest report and a brief statistic that reveal a quick increase or decrease in retail inventories, construction spending and rental vacancies rates, to name but a few, in reverse chronological order. It is easy to click on the historical studies from this first page, as well. The Time Series/Time Charts link takes the user to a place to choose the range of years, the survey, and one item from the survey (if you like), and the geographic level. For example, choose housing vacancies, 2008-2016, Northeast, and retrieve a document, or an Excel file, a bar chart or a line chart. From this page, tabs take the user to search boxes to look by state, metro areas, counties, cities or zip codes. It is easy to see the number of permits granted and any subsets of the indicators (by units or valuation) in cities by month or by annual enumerations.
While difficult, perhaps, to discern the meaning of the numbers, a quick search of the Wall Street Journal on the Bureau’s Economic Indicators and the keyword reliability yields many articles noting that these are the most reliable indicators of how the economy is waxing and waning, if not how the numbers are impacting individual lives. The user can look at a brief report or by clicking on the Excel icon yield the same report with pages of detailed data. For example, searching for Full Report on Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories and Orders, the Excel sheet has eight pages with very detailed data on durable goods (wood, nonmetallic, primary and fabricated), metals, all sorts of machinery, followed by detailed information about nondurable goods (food, beverage and textiles), as well as commodities. Increases, decreases, seasonally adjusted numbers are all here. A tab allows users to study the calendar of data releases.
All libraries that serve business, economics or political science scholars should make this resource readily available.
