A look at the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve Board indexes of capacity utilization, with an explanation of the indexes' construction, advantages, and shortcomings; conclusion of June 15 issue.

An examination of the usefulness of two measures of capacity utilization in predicting price pressures and future investment: one measure attempts to represent the maximum physical output a plant can produce, and one is based on changes in production costs as output increases; article concludes...

An analysis of broad national and regional trends in manufacturing that questions the validity of many popular beliefs about the decline of the manufacturing sector.

A review of how moderation in U.S. manufacturing labor costs and record growth in manufacturing productivity have helped to improve the U.S. trade deficit in recent years, and an evaluation of how well domestic producers have performed relative to their major trading partners.

U.S. firms are facing tough international competition, and the U.S. trade deficit has grown to a level that some find alarming. Why doesn't the United States respond by easing monetary policy to lower the dollar's exchange rate and reduce the price of U.S. goods in foreign markets? This...

An argument that the economic importance of manufacturing, although commonly thought to be declining, has remained relatively strong because of manufacturing's linkages with growth in other sectors of the economy.

In the last 50 years, the share of employment in manufacturing has declined in the United States. The main reason for this phenomenon is labor-saving technological progress. Variation among state tax polices and international economic conditions have played only minor roles. The source of future...

Since the 1970s, productivity growth in the manufacturing sector has outpaced the overall economy, yet the sector’s share of the workforce has declined dramatically. This leads us to ask if we are in fact engineering ourselves out of jobs. This Economic Commentary explores the relationship...