An official website of the United States government
PRICES & SPENDING • Sep 2021 • Volume 10 / Number 13
During economic downturns, how do these measures help in analyzing price change, and what can we assume about consumption? This Beyond the Numbers article explores the final C-CPI-U during the Great Recession and the recession that occurred as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the article evaluates consumer spending assumptions of the CPI-U and preliminary C-CPI-U during these recessionary periods to highlight challenges of lagged consumer spending data.
Read full article » | Download PDFRecent articles
The international air freight industry experienced record high rates in the spring of 2020. In 2020, there was a severe reduction in air travel combined with an enormous demand for personal protective equipment (PPE) all over the world. This reduced shipping capacity and urgent demand for PPE pushed prices for air freight transportation services to unprecedented heights.
Download PDF
Persons who were not working and were waiting to be recalled to a job from which they had been temporarily laid off are also included as unemployed. The number of experienced unemployed, those who had a job and became unemployed, provide a measure of the available supply of experienced workers. Unemployed persons are classified according to their last job. This Beyond the Numbers article examines how these statistics, the demand for and supply of labor, work together to tell us more about the labor market.
Download PDF
This Beyond the Numbers article looks at both generation and distribution prices for electricity, from 2004 to 2019. To examine price trends for electricity generation, this article compares utility and non-utility generation price movements. To analyze price trends for electricity distribution, this article compares price movements for different aggregations of regional residential electric power distribution. The article also discusses how prices have varied during the decline of coal, rise of natural gas, and early growth of renewable power as a share of electricity production.
Download PDF