BEA REIS data in the MCDC archive

[blodgettj]

The Bureau of Economic Analysis updates their Regional Economic Information System (REIS) set of economic indicators time series around April of each year. The MCDC downloads these data and stores them in data sets in our archive, in the beareis data directory ("filetype"). We usually update in late April or early May but this year it took a little longer because the BEA changed the format of the data that we download and convert. But yesterday (June 8, 2011) we did a full conversion run. When we do this we replace all 520 data sets that comprise the collection: ten files for each of the 50 states plus DC and the nation. The ten files correspond to ten categories of economic data (income, employment, farm income, transfer payments, an overall profile, etc. - some files come in SIC/NAICS pairs because of the change in coding schemes that began in 2001). Access the data at http://mcdc.missouri.edu/pub/data/beareis/Datasets.html .

Each row/observation in one of these data sets contains a time series of data for a specific geographic area (state or county usually) and a specific line item category. Here is a brief example of what you see in the moincn data set:

We applied two filters to get this: we specified that the County code had to be 29000 or 29001 (to get only Missouri totals and Adair county), and we also specified that LineCd values had to be <= 0030 (there are many more line codes in the data set). We also were selective about the variables to keep, and to save space we omitted some variables from the middle of the time series. Note that inc2001 is the start of the time series - because this is a NAICS-based data set. To get comparable data for the years 1969 to 2000 you would access the moinc data set.

Note that the "pro" ("profile") data set is a compendium of the most frequently used data items from the other data sets. The MCDC also provides access to these profile data via a dynamic web application that can be accessed via our applinks menu system (http://mcdc1.missouri.edu/cgi-bin/applinks/menu.py?sumlevel=040).
Here is what that report looks like for Callaway County (the data will be updated to 2009 & 2004 shortly):


You can also access these data using dynamic web applications at the BEA source - see http://www.bea.gov/regional/reis/ (from which page we downloaded the zipped csv files using the links at the bottom). The reason we were a bit late with our conversions this year is because the data formats changed from earlier years and we had to adapt our conversion code.