In this volume, we have studied the cyclical behavior of numerous business cycle indicators from the U.S. transportation sector and studied how they are related to those of the overall economy. Our study began with the conceptualization of what constitutes the transportation services sector,...

With the increasing importance of the service-providing sectors, information from these sectors has become essential to the understanding of contemporary business cycles. Contribution of services to GDP during postwar recessions is clearly recorded in Table 4.1 . On average, decline in real GDP...

Since the transportation sector plays an important role in the initiation and propagation of business cycles, in previous chapters we developed output [transportation services output (TSI)] and other indicators to construct an index of coincident indicators for the U.S. transportation sector to...

Transportation plays a central role in facilitating economic activities across sectors and between regions and thus should be essential to business cycle research. In this chapter, we identify four coincident indicators representing different aspects of the transportation sector. Foremost among...

In this chapter we develop a monthly output index of the U.S. transportation sector covering air, rail, water, truck, transit, and pipeline activities. We call it the transportation services index (TSI). Separate indexes for freight and passenger are also constructed. Before the development of...

During the 2001 International Symposium on Forecasting in Atlanta, Peg Young approached me to inquire whether I would be interested in developing an output measure of the transportation sector for the purpose of macroeconomic forecasting. At that time, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics...