Foreign Trade

What will be included in the new Advance Report?

The Advance Report will contain seasonally adjusted and not-seasonally adjusted export and import goods data by 1-digit end-use categories and balance totals. It will contain monthly data for the current year, as well as the full previous year. The Advance Report will not include services or trade in goods on a balance of payments basis. To see the sample layout, go to: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/notices/Advance_Report.pdf.

Are there any plans to publish 5-digit end-use categories in the Advance Report?

At this time, there are no plans to publish at the 5-digit end-use level.

When will the Advance Report be published, and how frequently?

The Advance Report will be published monthly, and the first release is scheduled for July 30, 2015. The Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) will continue to jointly release the full FT-900: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services (FT-900) report approximately 35 calendar days after the reference month ends.  The new Advance Report will be published approximately a week sooner.

What is the Advance Report release schedule for the remainder of 2015?

The release schedule for the Advance Report for the remainder of the year is as follows:

At what time will the Advance Report be published?

The Report will be released at 8:30 a.m. on http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/advance/current/index.html

How much historical data will be made available to the public?

With the first release of this report, we will provide data monthly, from January 2013 to June 2015.

Will any country information be included in the Advance Report?

No, there will be no country information included in the Advance Report.

Who benefits from the Advance Report? 

Private sector data users and other government agencies will both benefit from an earlier release of U.S. trade data. The Advance Report allows policymakers and private data users to make data-driven decisions sooner due to this high-level “snapshot” of trade in goods. In addition, the release will also allow BEA to incorporate export and import data from the third month of a quarter into the advance quarterly estimate of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), thereby producing a more complete quarterly estimate. The advance GDP estimate offers the first glimpse of the broadest measure of how the U.S. economy is performing for any given quarter.

Will the Advance Report include any historical revisions?

Not seasonally adjusted advance data are never revised in the Advance Report. Each June, advance seasonally adjusted data are updated to reflect recalculated seasonal adjustments. For December statistical month Advance Reports, each prior month of the most recent full year of advance data is updated so that the totals of the seasonally adjusted months equal the annual totals.

Why does the Year-to-Date total in the Advance data only contain data through the previous month?

The Year-to-Date totals in each exhibit for the Advance data reflect Year-to-Date through the previous month. Final data are only available through the previous month.  For direct comparability purposes, the Year-To-Date totals reflect the same time period in both the Advance and Final data.

Each January Advance report, the Year-to-Date totals reflect January-December of the previous year.