The Income- and Expenditure-Side Estimates of U.S. Output Growth—: An Update to 2011Q2

In light of recent large revisions to the official measures of U.S. output, this update reviews the evidence in my 2010 Brookings Paper showing that the income-side estimate of output (currently called gross domestic income, or GDI) likely captures business cycle fluctuations in true output better than its better-known expenditure-side counterpart (called gross domestic product, or GDP). Most notably, over the 2007-09 downturn, the revisions moved the expenditure-side estimates closer to the income-side estimates, which showed that the downturn was considerably worse than reported initially by the expenditure-side estimates. The tendency for the expenditure-side estimates to be revised toward the income-side estimates is clearer now, as is a tendency for the smoothed income-side estimates to be revised away from the smoothed expenditure-side estimates.