Industrial and Overall Economy Data on Capacity Utilization for the US Economy: A Note

This paper is motivated by the debate about the decline in the degree of capacity utilization in the US economy observed since the begin of the 2000s. Its purpose is to check if capacity utilization calculated by the Fed for the industrial sector can be tracked by a Supermultiplier model estimated with data for the whole economy. The model tracks well the actual series of induced investment share, induced investment and stock of capital of the whole economy, but not the degree of capacity utilization when compared with capacity utilization from the industry. We investigate the possible causes of this divergence. We show that (i) there are some discrepancies between the trend of the actual data on stock of capital and the productive capacity that is used to calculate the capacity utilization of the industrial sector, and (ii) since 2000, industrial production has been growing slower than GDP. This could help to explain the discrepancies between capacity utilization of the entire economy and of the industrial sector, suggesting that this demand shock suffered by the industrial sector, combined with a slow mechanism of adjustment of capacity to demand, is one possible explanation for the observed decline in utilization rates.