Printing and Publishing Output Up 3% in 2000

With some extensive revisions introduced by the Federal Reserve Board late last year to all of its industrial production and capacity utilization estimates, it appears that the printing and publishing industry fared better during 2000 than preliminary numbers had indicated.

Current estimates peg total printing/publishing output growth for last year at 3.0%. This is almost twice as strong as the growth trend that had prevailed in the unrevised numbers, and a sharp improvement over the 0.5% output decline recorded between 1998 and 1999.

Newspaper industry output was weak, particularly over the second half of 2000. Full-year growth was estimated at 0.7%—down from 1.5% in 1999—with December 2000 production coming up 2.1% short of its year-earlier level. The periodicals/books/cards industry subsector fared best of all in printing/publishing groups last year. On an annual average basis, output from this subsector expanded 5.6% between 1999 and 2000 after seeing total production contract by 3.2% the year before.

Production in the job printing industry component (encompassing business forms and various other commercial printing jobs) looked to be on a path to grow by only about 0.5% during 2000, but Fed revisions brought full-year output to a level 2.3% ahead of the 1999 total.