Proposal: reallocating government enterprises — embed in the nowcast, or apply after?

[WesIngwersen]

Gov enterprises reallocation plan

Status: proposal, no decision taken. Doc only — no code, no behaviour change. Opening it as a PR for review rather than pushing straight to nowcast because it asks for four decisions.

Written off the Step 4a government findings in output_estimation_plan.md §"Government — do the enterprises", and building on methods discussion #3 (Before vs After Redefinitions, resolved 2025-11-17 in favour of After).

The question

Cornerstone wants to reallocate the government enterprise sectors into the private industries and commodities they actually produce. Two of five are already done — federal and S&L electric utilities into 221100, S&L transit into 485000 — hardcoded in the industry correspondence. Does the rest belong inside the nowcast build or after it?

Recommendation

Never before the balance. Build it as a reallocation in BEA's chapter-9 sense — BEA's own method, applied to secondary products BEA left under the industry-technology assumption — sited at Step 7, gated by config, with the un-reallocated BEA-code MUT quartet kept as a stored deliverable. That makes "embedded" and "afterwards" the same module run at two different times, and turns the question into scheduling rather than architecture.

Pre-balance is disqualified by three independent blockers, each fatal alone: every RAS target is denominated in BEA codes and is BR-equivalent; it destroys the 2017 benchmark-replay backbone test; and redefinition ratios don't exist for reallocated codes.

What the numbers say

Enterprise output is 379,327m — 1.10% of industry output, of which 275,650m (72.7%) is co-production of private commodities.

• It is two problems, not one. Five enterprise industry codes but only two commodity codes. The co-production is a redefinition in BEA's exact sense and its method applies directly. The 103,677m of primary production is not, and BEA's method is silent on it.
• BEA leaves S&L enterprises alone specifically — not government generally. It redefines general government at 35.5% against an economy-wide 40.8%, redefines 38% of S00102, and moves exactly zero out of S00201/S00202/S00203. Why isn't documented anywhere I could find.
• Only two receivers are materially extrapolated: 221300 water at 4.5× and 713200 gambling at 1.15×. Everything else sits at or below the 0.20–0.22× the already-completed electric and transit reallocations ran at.

Decisions this needs

1. Is 221300 acceptable as a merged sector that is 82% government, and 713200 at 54%?
2. coproduction only (shippable, no new data) or full (gated on a Census government-finance FBA that doesn't exist)?
3. Is the BEA-detail MUT quartet a published deliverable or an internal artifact? §6 depends on the former.
4. Does the reallocated table become the default for the model build, or an alternate scenario? Probably a ModelRequirements.md question for methods.

⚠️ Blockers flagged, not resolved

• A 19bn SUT/Make disagreement on S00203 industry output (292,843 vs 273,910) must be run down first — the reallocation is defined on industry output.
• Satellite tables have to move with the sectors. S00203/S00102 are hardcoded allocation keys in the transportation-fuel and non-energy-fuels transforms; moving the money and leaving the emissions produces an EF error rather than a reclassification.
• Benchmark replay is not available as validation here, because BEA's documented method doesn't reproduce BEA's own AR tables (discussion update pyproject to reflect bedrock #3). The proposal says what is available instead.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[WesIngwersen]

This needs to be expanding to be more complete to move all the activities in government that are private-like into their corresponding sectors, keeping government to be purely government-specific services the following other sectors:

Code	Current	Possible future
491000	Postal service	Couriers and messengers
S00102	Other federal government enterprises	Utilities; lotteries, other
GSLGE	State and local government (educational services)	Elementary and secondary schools
GSLGH	State and local government (hospitals and health services)	Hospitals and other health
GSLGO	State and local government (other services)	TBD
S00203	Other state and local government enterprises	Utilities; lotteries, other