Data on Gross State Product prior to 2017 has disappeared from the main page of the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It is also gone from some third party hosts like FRED. It turns out BEA is in the middle of revising how they calculate state GDP; they have the new version done back to 2017, and took down the older inconsistent estimates until they can recalculate them. After that, they tell me they will repost pre-2017 state Gross Domestic Product:
In the mean time, they offer some messy and seemingly incomplete versions of pre-2017 GDP here, and you can find 1980-2021 state GDP (along with many other nice variables) in a nice panel from the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research’s National Welfare Data.
You can find more details on the actual changes BEA is making to how they calculate GDP here. Most changes seem relatively minor for states, but might have more impact on the measured relative size of industries. For instance, “equity REITs will be reclassified from the funds, trusts, and other financial vehicles industry to the real estate industry, while mortgage REITs will remain classified as funds, trusts, and other financial vehicles”.
US GDP fell for the second straight quarter according to statistics released this week by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. This means that by one common definition we’re now in a recession, which has ignited a debate about whether “two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth” is the best definition (as opposed to ‘when the NBER says there’s one’, like I generally teach and Jeremy argued for here, or something else).
Naturally this debate has political overtones, since the party in power would be blamed for a recession, so we’ve seen the White House CEA argue that we’re not in a recession, many on the other side argue that we are, and plentiful hypocrisy from people who should know better.
But in political terms, the fight over the binary “are we in a recession” call won’t be the big economic factor in November’s elections- that will be inflation and GDP, especially 3rd quarter GDP. One of the oldest and best predictors of US elections is the Fair Model, which uses inflation and the number of recent “strong growth quarters”. Fair’s update following the recent Q2 GDP announcement states:
the predicted vote share for the Democrats is 46.70, which compares to 48.99 in October. The smaller predicted vote share for the Democrats is due to two fewer strong growth quarters and slightly higher inflation
By Election Day we’ll have 3 more months of economic data making it clear whether inflation is getting under control and whether economic activity is picking back up or continuing to decline. Monthly data releases on inflation and unemployment will be closely watched, but the most discussed release will likely be third quarter GDP. It will summarize 3 months instead of just one, it will be of huge relevance to the debate over how severe the recession is or whether we’re even in one, and it will likely be released less than two weeks before election day. The NBER almost certainly won’t weigh in by then; they tend to take over a year to date recessions, not adjudicate debates in real time.
So when BEA does release their Q3 GDP estimate in late October, what will it say? Markets currently estimate at least a 75% chance it will be positive (they had estimated a 36% chance of positive Q2 GDP just before the latest announcement). That sounds high to me, the yield curve is still inverted and I bet investment will continue to drag, but forecasting exact GDP numbers is hard. Its a much easier bet that whatever the number turns out to be will loom large in political debates just before the elections. Perhaps we’ll get the Q3 GDP growth number that would make for the most chaotic debate: 0.0%.
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