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Economic Programs Overview
Wholesale
Monthly Wholesale Trade SurveyTo provide monthly estimates of sales and inventories of wholesale trade industries. The United States Code, Title 13, authorizes this survey and provides for voluntary responses.
Companies with employment that are primarily engaged in merchant wholesale trade in the U.S. (NAICS 42). These include merchant wholesalers that take title of the goods they sell, and jobbers, industrial distributors, exporters, and importers. Excluded are non-merchant wholesalers such as manufacturer sales branches and offices; agents, merchandise or commodity brokers, and commission merchants; and other businesses whose primary activity is other than wholesale trade.
Companies provide data on dollar values of merchant wholesale sales, end-of-month inventories, and methods of inventory valuation.
Companies report data for activity taking place during each previous month. New samples are drawn every 5 years and are updated quarterly. Use of the latest sample began in 1997. The survey has been conducted monthly since 1946.
A mail-out/mail-back survey of about 4,000 selected wholesale firms. The sample of merchant wholesalers is drawn from the Business Register (BR) which contains all Employer Identification Numbers (EINs) and locations of establishments for listed businesses. EINs may represent one or more establishments and companies may have one or more EINs. Firms are stratified by merchant wholesale sales, inventories and major kind of business (determined from the latest census of wholesale trade).
The sample is updated every quarter to reflect "births" and "deaths"; adding new employer businesses identified in the business and professional classification survey, and dropping companies that no longer have active EINs. New firms are represented in the sample approximately 9 months after they begin operation. To account for births during this interim period, data are imputed for all EINs that go out of business but are still active on the IRS mailing list.
Monthly Wholesale Trade Sales and Inventories reports are released 6 weeks after the close of the reference month. They contain preliminary current month estimates and final data for the previous month. Statistics include sales, and inventory/sales ratios by 4-digit NAICS code along with standard errors. Data are also shown for NAICS 42. Data are both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted.
The Annual Benchmark Report for Wholesale Trade are released annually each spring. This report contains estimated annual sales, monthly and year-end inventories, inventory/sales ratios, purchases, gross margins, and gross margin/sales ratios by kind of business. Annual estimates are benchmarked to the most recent census of wholesale trade. This report also presents the results of a benchmarking operation that revises monthly sales and inventories estimates. Estimates are both seasonally adjusted and unadjusted.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis uses the estimates as an input to estimate sales and inventories for the Gross Domestic Product. The Council of Economic Advisers uses the estimates to assess near term economic activity. The Department of the Treasury uses the estimates to research economic trends.
Business and industry groups use the estimates to forecast future demand. Researchers use the estimates to benchmark the results from their own sampling operations. Manufacturers can use inventory estimates as a proxy for the distributors confidence for future expected sales.
Provides a designated principal economic indicator and the only source of current data on wholesale trade.
Business and Professional
Classification Survey
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You are here:
Economic Programs Overview
Wholesale
Monthly Wholesale Trade SurveyLast revised: Wednesday, 09-Aug-2006 13:01:53 EDT
