Exiobase import factors report excludes some sectors that do not have IEFs?

[cclin130]

The import factors report lists the following sectors as those without IEFs because no equivalent commodities were found in Exiobase:

But when I download import factors off of the data.gov website, the file I download is missing other summary-level sectors

For example, summary sector 23 is not present

[bl-young]

I believe that Table 4 is for sectors WITH imports, but no IEF. I don't believe there are any imports of 23 in the IO tables.

[cclin130]

Yep, I noticed that 23 is not in the BEA/Census import shares data. Thank you!

[cclin130]

@bl-young I am seeing that the Exiobase IEFs do have the Used summary-level sector. Am I misinterpreting the Table 4 in another way?

[bl-young]

I believe the assessment of whether imports occur is done in the IO tables themselves, not based on the BEA/Census imports data. So this seems like a case where the IO tables may have data in the imports vector for these sectors, but perhaps the actual trade data doesn't directly support that (based on our mappings - these would come from the BEA services dataset, I believe). This is just my immediate reaciton.

[cclin130]

Understood. I checked for 621 and confirmed that within Exiobase, there are non-zero bilateral trade values in Health and social work services (85) to the US.

It feels a bit confusing to me in the report to write:

IEFs were generated for all USEEIO commodities that have imports except for those listed in Table 4. No equivalent commodities were found in EXIOBASE for these commodities listed.

Because the 621, 622, 623 sectors have entries in the sector concordance files -- so EXIOBASE does have these commodities. But the actual BEA trade data does not support the fact that Exiobase says these sectors are imported, and therefore they are dropped. Used and Other are not present in Exiobase and align with what's mentioned in the report (and I think this answers our confusion regarding Used).

Within CEDA, I have started the same exercise and will make note of which sectors (1) are not in CEDA at all (this is Used and Other), (2) are in CEDA but have no USA trade in CEDA

[bl-young]

I'm having a hard time re-creating Table 4 so I'm a bit confused exactly what led to that list. There are a few other sectors that show imports in the IO data but do not appear in the BEA/Census imports data and so do not have import factors (e.g. 713) - I'm not sure why they didn't make it into Table 4.

so EXIOBASE does have these commodities. But the actual BEA trade data does not support the fact that Exiobase says these sectors are imported, and therefore they are dropped.

^ This is correct. The text in the report is not quite right then.

[bl-young]

Ok it turns out that one issue is that I believe the values in that table are from 2017, not 2019. In 2017 there are no imports for 713, so that was actually correct.

There are two separate issues we were trying to document here, which I think got conflated and poorly explained. One is where we don't have good mappings (Other is the prime example here). A second issue is a mismatch of imports data; where we don't have imports data from BEA and Census we can not create an aggregate import factor as there is no way to aggregate across regions. This is the case for 621, 622, and 623. Also the final issue is that this table was created before we implemented a fix and so Used shouldn't be in there at all.

So yes, your thought here makes sense.

Within CEDA, I have started the same exercise and will make note of which sectors (1) are not in CEDA at all (this is Used and Other), (2) are in CEDA but have no USA trade in CEDA

[cclin130]

sounds good, I appreciate you looking into this! I will add a note about sectors without import EFs in CEDA in our report draft