Annual Trade Survey

Definition

Annual Trade Survey. Provides detailed industry measures of sales and inventories for most wholesale trade activities.

Covers companies with employees that are primarily engaged in merchant wholesale trade in the United States. These include merchant wholesalers that take title to the goods they sell, jobbers, industrial distributors, exporters, and importers. Beginning with data for 2003, manufacturers’ sales branches and offices are also included.

In 2007, the Census Bureau plans to add agents and brokers and wholesale electronic markets to the ATS. For the ATS, companies provide data on the dollar value of annual sales, end-of-year inventories and methods of inventory valuation, and purchases and gross margins.

This information is used for the annual I-O accounts and to supplement Economic Census information for the benchmark I-O accounts.