Economists with the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics report that two construction staples entailing highly capital intensive production — cement and gypsum — have shown price increases of 16.3 percent and 10.2 percent over the past six years. Yearly gains or market stability contrast with moderate to sharply weaker pricing in other materials, and helped fuel an unprecedented cement and gypsum board plant capacity upgrade during the mostly prosperous 1996-2001 period.

The trends are reflected in the BLS' 2001 Producer Price Index for Finished Goods study, which for all industries noted a price decline last year of 1.6 percent. Highlights of the study were published in October in the Bureau's Monthly Labor Review, dated July 2002. Producer Price Indexes measure average changes in prices of about 3,200 commodities, based on 80,000 quotations solicited monthly from producers. BLS tracks cement and gypsum products under “Durable Manufacturing Materials” and “Construction Materials” categories, respectively. Composite figures for each of those categories indicated here account for the six sample product types and a host of similar commodities — hence the top numbers are not the sums of those below.