Trade Data Revisions

Entering the world trade data website at usitc.gov I was offered this notice....

So I asked around inside and got this reply...

This is typical for any set of stats.  Revisions can come several years into the future as they clean the data and get more forms in.  The changes are normally  not very big (unless somebody screwed-up).  They'll get more forms into the system that maybe were filled-out on paper instead of electronically.  They'll also look for outlying/unlikely values and either drop them or adjust them.  They'll also impute data for cases where the form is only partially filled-out.  It's basically a bunch of detail work that takes 1/2 of the total collection time to get the stats as accurate as possible.

It would be interesting to go back and redo some reports to see any changes the updates effect.

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