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U.S. foreign trade prices in 1982:
import index falls, export indexes mixed
Mark J. Johnson
U.S. import prices1 fell 2.8 percent in 1982, as the worldwide economic slowdown and the strong U.S. dollar placed downward pressure on U.S. import prices. (See table 1.) The import price drop continued to the sharply reduced rate of increase in U.S. domestic prices, as measured by the Consumer Price Index and the Producer Price Index.
Crude petroleum import prices, which account for 25.8 percent of the weight of the all-import price index, fell 3.7 percent during the year, and were a major factor in the overall drop in import prices. Some other categories which contributed to this decline were intermediate manufactured products and telecommunications equipment.
The price indexes for exports cover 71 percent of the value of all exported products. For those exports measured, price increases were concentrated mainly in categories of finished manufactured goods. (See table 2.) Most semifinished goods and primary products showed price declines. These results were greatly influenced by the worldwide economic slump, the strong dollar, which tended to raise the prices of U.S. goods in foreign markets, and the drop in demand for U.S. exports by debt-affected nations. Grain and nonferrous metals were key categories which showed price declines, falling 7.3 and 4.3 percent, respectively. The index for machinery and transport equipment, which accounts for 35.3 percent of all exports, rose 3.9 percent.
This excerpt is from an article published in the May 1983 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.
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1 Howard N Fullerton, Jr., "The 1995 force: a first look," Monthly Labor Review, December 1980, pp. 11-21; and unpublished statistics.
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