Scope and Industry Coverage of the 2007 Commodity Flow Survey

摘要

This resource paper provides information and background material to facilitate a workshop discussion on the scope and industry coverage of the 2007 Commodity Flow Survey (CFS). The workshop will be held at the CFS Conference scheduled for July 8-9,2005, in Boston, Massachusetts. The topic of the scope and industry coverage of the CFS for discussion purposes can be broken into five research areas: 1. Those commodities and industries that have been out-of-scope to the CFS; 2. Incomplete and inconsistent industry coverage that occurred in the 2002 CFS when the commodity classification scheme changed from the standard industrial classification (SIC) codes to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) system; 3. The dramatic growth of auxiliaries and their role in our increasingly sophisticated transportation system; 4. The role of third-party logistic providers (3PLs) in transportation brought about by the adoption of supply chain logistics and the outsourcing by shippers of their transportation functions; and 5. The necessity to better understand how to capture and identify intermodal shipments in the CFS. This paper will comment on all five of these research areas but will focus primarily on the last four because they are the most achievable given budget and technical considerations and are important to producing an accurate and comprehensive CFS.