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    Analysis

    February 5, 2016

    Construction Expenditures through December 2015

    Written by Peter Wright

    Each month the Commerce Department issues its construction put in place (CPIP) data, usually on the first working day covering activity two months earlier. December data was released on Monday February 1st.

    Construction Put in Place is based on spending work as it occurs, estimated for a given month from a sample of projects. In effect the value of a project is spread out from the project’s start to its completion. This is different from the starts data published by the Commerce Department for residential construction, by Dodge Data & Analytics and Reed Construction for non-residential and Industrial Information Resources for industrial construction. In the case of starts data the whole project is entered to the data base when ground is broken. The result is that the starts data can be very spiky which is not the case with CPIP. In December there continued to be a situation where the CPIP data as we report below was strong but has been slowing since August.

    Peter Wright

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