Selective Editing Strategies for the U. S. Census Bureau Foreign Trade Data
Maria M. Garcia, Alison Gajcowski, and Andrew Jennings
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ABSTRACT
The U.S. Census Bureau Foreign Trade Division (FTD) publishes monthly import and export
statistics for the shipment of merchandise goods between foreign countries and the United States
customs territories and foreign trade zones. The FTD publishes these statistics for over 17,000
import and 10,000 export commodity classifications. These data are not survey based, but
collected from forms upon arrival or departure of merchandise goods. Data are edited and
checked at every step of collection, processing, and tabulation. However, due to the limitations of
the merchandise trade statistics program, monthly publication cells may still be subject to errors.
We present score functions to rank edit failing records according to their potential impact on
publication totals. In this report we present four separate score functions and the results of testing
these score functions with the 2004 exports data.
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