The national income and product accounts of the United States

This chapter focuses on the United States and its National Income and Product Accounts, otherwise known as NIPA. It first presents the history of NIPAs from the 1930s through to today. It looks at the NIPA summary account tables, and at other NIPA tables, and it explains how NIPAs are disseminated. Next, it considers the other sets of national, industry, regional, and international accounts produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and integrated with the NIPAs, as well as programmes that provide source data used for the preparation of the NIPAs. Finally, the chapter discusses the importance of the BEA’s advance quarterly GDP estimate and explains the methodology used to prepare it.