Economic Report of the President: Together with The Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers by Council of Economic Advisers

This publication from the White House outlines the economic growth of the United States under President Donald J. Trump.In the 10 chapters that constitute this Report, we present evidence that the Trump Administration’s policy actions and priorities are thus far delivering economic results consistent with the 1946 mandate.For the second consecutive year, the U.S. economy outperformed expectations and broke from recent trends by a substantial margin. In June 2017, the Congressional Budget Office projected that during the four quarters of 2018, real gross domestic product (GDP) would grow by 2.0 percent, the unemployment rate would decline by 0.1 percentage point, to 4.2 percent, and employment growth would average 107,000 jobs per month. Instead, real GDP in the first three quarters of 2018 grew at a compound annual rate of 3.2 percent—above the Trump Administration’s own Q4-over-Q4 forecast for the second successive year—the unemployment rate declined by 0.4 percentage point, to a near-50-year low of 3.7 percent, and employment growth averaged 223,000 jobs per month. Growth in labor productivity, which averaged just 1.0 percent between 2009:Q3 and 2016:Q4, doubled to 2.0 percent in 2018. Capital expenditures by nonfinancial businesses rose 13.9 percent at a compound annual rate through 2018:Q3.The strong economic performance in 2017 and 2018 was not merely a continuation of trends already under way during the postrecession expansion, but rather constituted a distinct break from the previous pace of economic and employment growth since the start of the current expansion in 2009:Q3. Consistent with conclusions in the 2018 Economic Report of the President, investment, manufacturing employment, worker compensation, and new startups have all risen sharply in the two years since the 2016 election. Read more