Dataset

Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account (ACPSA)

Periodicity

Launched in 2013, the ACPSA is revised annually

Source/Sponsor

Partnership between the National Endowment for the Arts’ Office of Research & Analysis and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

Research Topic

The Arts Economy

Notable Features

Inflation-adjusted estimates of the arts and culture’s real contribution to the U.S. economy

Value added

Gross output

Full time-series spanning 1998-2017

Employment and compensation by arts and cultural industries

Supply and consumption of arts and cultural goods and services, including imports and exports

Gross output price indexes for arts and cultural commodities

Arts and cultural commodity output and employment multipliers

Comprehensive Updates

This wave of the ACPSA reflects comprehensive revisions or “benchmark” updates to the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ national income and product accounts. Consequently, revisions were made to the full time-series of the ACPSA dataset, beginning in 1998 and ending in 2017.

The comprehensive revisions show that the arts economy was larger than previously thought. Following the benchmark update, arts and cultural “value added” in 2016 was $839.6 billion—an amount $35.4 billion greater than the pre-revision 2016 estimate of $804.2 billion.

The industry gaining the greatest amount vis-a-vis the comprehensive revision was “web publishing and streaming” (an industry labeled in the BEA accounts as “other information services” and which also includes private libraries and archives). Following the comprehensive revision, value added by this industry to GDP gained $60 billion.

Alternatively, value added in 2016 by motion picture and video industries was revised downward by nearly $31 billion.

Overview

In 2017, the production of arts and cultural goods and services in the United States contributed $877.8 billion, or 4.5 percent, directly to the nation’s GDP. Also in 2017—the most recent year for which data are available—over 5 million wage-and-salary workers were employed to produce arts and cultural goods and services. Those workers were compensated $387 billion in 2017.