Trade Data

Paper and Microfiche Historical Data

Disclaimer: This is a guide to detailed U.S. import/export data, primarily in book and microfiche format in the Public Documents and Maps Department on the 3rd floor of the Bostock library.  It is not comprehensive, nor is it necessarily entirely accurate with regard to completeness of holdings within a year range. There is even older data in the Public Documents and Maps shelf list. Please ask for help.

Note: The "Schedule" in the titles or subtitles of the paper reports (e.g., A, B, or E) refers to the Tariff Schedule under which the data is collected. This may differ from the code system used to report the data.

"Code system" listed below represents how the data is organized in a report, according to the section entitled "Commodity Classification" in its introduction. The U.S. adopted the Harmonized System first in 1989; before then, they used the TSUSA system.  The SITC system has been used to publish some data simultaneously with the other two.  To create a long time series, you may have to determine how a particular commodity is coded using several different systems, but try to use the following charts and read the code definitions carefully to make sure your data is comparable across years.

More explanation of the coding systems can be found in our web page on that subject.  

"Digits" refers to the number of numerical digits (i.e., the specificity of the commodities).

"ASI" refers to the microfiche American Statistics Index collection in the Public Documents and Maps Dept.

Foreign Trade (FT) Reports