Industrial production and capacity utilization: the 2002 historical and annual revision

In late 2002, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System published a revision to its index of industrial production and the related measures of capacity utilization. The primary feature of the revision was the reclassification back to 1972 of production and capacity indexes for individual industries from the Standard Industrial Classification System to the North American Industry Classification System. The revision also reflects the incorporation of newly available, more comprehensive source data, and it introduced improved methods for measuring the annual real output of communications equipment manufacturing. ; Along with the updating and the restatement of the data using the North American Industry Classification System, all production and capacity indexes are now expressed as percentages of output in 1997. The new information resulted in an upward revision to the rate of increase in industrial production and capacity from 1997 to 2000. For that period, the average rate of industrial capacity utilization is 0.7 percentage point higher than previously reported. The most recent business-cycle peak is still June 2000, at 116.2 percent of 1997, with the low being the fourth quarter of 2001. The rate of industrial capacity in the third quarter of 2002, at 76.2 percent, is essentially unchanged from previously reported data. The rate is more than 5 percentage points below its 1972-2001 average and about 3 percentage points below the trough in the 1990-91 recession but 5 percentage points above the trough in the 1982 recession.