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Inside this Issue: Timely Trade Statistics! Identifying Log-In Charting European Trade Gerry Brown Returns! Remembering 9/11... On The Road Again! Article Archive About the Newsletter	Fall 2002 Delivering Timely U.S. International Trade Statistics As members of the U.S. exporting community, many of you depend on the international trade statistics released each month by the U.S. Department of Commerce for everything from determining market share for a specific product to monitoring the flow of goods around the world. Did you ever wonder what happens behind the scenes that makes this release of statistics on over 18,000 U.S. commodities traded worldwide possible? As an assistant division chief of the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Division, I am responsible, along with over 150 other government experts to make this happen. The U.S. Census Bureau (Census) collects and compiles millions of merchandise export and import transactions monthly from various electronic and manual (paper) sources including U.S. exports to Canada from Statistics Canada. In the current process, Census prepares the goods portion of the release from this data, then combines it with the services statistics and Balance of Payments adjustments produced by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) during the seventh week of the process. Currently, this information is released in the monthly U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services report about 50 days after the end of the reference month. That is also exactly when you see the summary statistics on either our Web site at http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade or the commodity detail at http://www.usatradeonline.gov A major goal of the Foreign Trade Division is to position ourselves to be able to release the trade statistics about 30 days after the reference month, and improve the timeliness of the statistics for use in critical public and private decision-making. In order to reach this goal, the entire collection, compilation, and publication process must be re-engineered to allow the release of complete and accurate data 20 days earlier. Simply moving the release earlier without adequate preparation would seriously compromise the quality of the trade statistics. Only about 77 percent of the import value and 65 percent of the export value have been received and processed at the 30-day mark. The amount of data not included in the proper month would increase significantly and important factors that are currently taken into account would be omitted, such as: consequential analytical data corrections, import auto summaries and foreign trade zone entries. Therefore, simply moving the release schedule earlier in the short term is neither feasible nor acceptable. Over the past few years many exporting companies have begun filing data electronically. Ninety-nine percent of import data is already filed electronically, but some of it not quite early enough. We are moving the trade statistics release earlier by about one week starting in March 2003 for the January 2003 statistics. The 2003 release schedule published this fall reflects this change (link). However, in order to release complete and accurate data at the 30-day mark, several changes in process were implemented and more must be done. In September, President Bush signed legislation, Public Law 107-228, which will require the filing of all export data electronically. We will be issuing regulations this year (2003) to require the mandatory filing with the AES for all export shipments by early 2004. We will continue to work with Customs, BEA and Statistics Canada to ensure that the data on services and exports to Canada are available for the accelerated release. With these improvements we will be able to accelerate the release of the trade statistics even further, if not to the “30-day reference month” time period. The 2003 Schedule of Release dates can be found at http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/faq/gen/gen0007.html . USA Trade Online customers can find the schedule http://www.stat-usa.gov/usatrade.nsf/vwRef/sched03?OpenDocument Chuck Woods is the Assistant Division Chief of the Foreign Trade Division at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. He can be reached via email with questions at charles.a.woods@census.gov