BEA's regional projections program is being discontinued, and the projections presented in this news release complete the final cycle of a set of long-term projections of economic activity and population for states, metropolitan areas, and BEA economic areas. In addition to discontinuing the regional projections, BEA has transferred the business cycle indicators to The Conference Board, and BEA, along with the Census Bureau, will phase out their pollution abatement and control expenditures estimates and will scale back their joint project to obtain plant-level data on foreign direct investment in the United States. BEA prepared its first set of regional projections in the 1960's in response to the need for long-term infrastructure planning by the Water Resources Council, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and, later, the Environmental Protection Agency and state and local government agencies. BEA has updated the projections about every five years. The diskettes include a program so that selected records from the data files can be imported into computer spreadsheets.
BEA estimates are available in several forms besides the printed news releases.
Most of BEA's estimates and analyses appear in the Survey of Current Business, BEA's monthly journal. The Survey of Current Business is available from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC 20402. In addition, the Survey of Current Business is now available on Internet in a searchable, retrievable electronic format at least a week before the printed version.