Household Expenditures

The U.S. control totals for the Household Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) come from the BEA's National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) for the current year.  Beginning with the 2017 IMPLAN data, we now also incorporate state-level PCE data from the BEA (which are lagged one year but controlled to the current NIPA totals).  There are about 100 NIPA expenditure categories,  which we distribute to the IMPLAN sectoring scheme using more detailed PCE data from the latest BEA Benchmark I-O.  

The BEA data are for all household income groups combined; to break these out by household income group we turn to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) data, which are lagged but provide estimates of expenditures by various income categories.  

These expenditure data are in terms of purchaser prices, so we must margin the data; that is, we must split the purchaser values among the producer price and any transportation, wholesale, and retail margins. This is done using data from the latest BEA Benchmark. These values are then matched to the appropriate producing, transportation, wholesale, and retail sectors, resulting in an allocation of PCE spending across IMPLAN sectors for each IMPLAN household income group.

For each household income category, these national spending values by IMPLAN sector are converted to coefficients (proportions of total PCE). To get state-level and county-level PCE expenditures by IMPLAN sector and household income category, these national coefficients are multiplied by each state and county's spending by household income category. Therefore, the spending pattern for each income class is constant across the U.S. While the CE data is reported by large region, analysis performed by IMPLAN showed no statistically significant difference between regions.