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Michael Blake
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Pennsylvania Report First in State Series
on Construction From Census Bureau

The Commerce Department's Census Bureau today released the first in a
series of state reports on the economy's construction sector from the 1997
Economic Census.

The report, 1997 Economic Census, Geographic Area Series, Construction:
Pennsylvania, was released on the Internet. The remaining 50 reports
-- one for each state and the District of Columbia -- will be released
over the next few weeks.

Among the report's findings for Pennsylvania:

- Approximately 230,000 construction workers were employed in the
state; the payroll totaled $7 billion.

- The value of construction work done by the state's construction
establishments amounted to $33 billion. Approximately 88 percent of
the work was done inside the state.

- Buildings of all kinds, valued at $26 billion, accounted for most
(78 percent) of all construction. Nonbuilding construction highways,
bridges, sewers, utilities, blast furnaces and other construction
work was valued at $7 billion, or about 22 percent.

The report shows 1997 state-level data on the number of establishments,
employment, payroll, value of construction work done, value added, cost of
subcontractors and materials, rental costs and capital expenditures.

Statistics in these reports are compiled from data collected on census
questionnaires. The questionnaires are mailed to a sample of
establishments designed to provide reliable estimates for each state and
each construction industry. Relative standard errors provide estimates of
sampling error. These statistics are also subject to nonsampling error
from various sources, such as the inability to identify all cases in the
actual universe and classification errors. Steps were taken in all phases
of collection, processing and tabulation to minimize the effects of
nonsampling error.