The Federal Reserve Board plans to issue its annual revision to the
index of industrial production (IP) and the related measures of capacity
utilization around the end of the first quarter of 2019. The Economic
Census for 2017 will not be available from the U.S. Census Bureau by
early 2019, so no new annual benchmark data will be included for
manufacturing. Other annual data, including information on the mining
of metallic and nonmetallic minerals (except fuels), will be
incorporated. The updated IP indexes will include revisions to the
monthly indicator (either product data or input data) and to seasonal
factors for each industry. In addition, the estimation methods for some
series may be changed. Any modifications to the methods for estimating
the output of an industry will affect the index from 1972 to the
present.
Capacity and capacity utilization will be revised to incorporate
data through the fourth quarter of 2018 from the U.S. Census Bureau's
Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization along with new data on
capacity from the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Department of Energy,
and other organizations.
