🚀 go-pugleaf

Larry Jones asks for sources of information on trade restrictions.  Since
this is a hot topic these days, I thought it might be useful to repost
the following item on the National Trade Data Bank.  Your Library's
reference department may very well carry this product.

Best,
Jim
--------------------Reposted from SOS-DATA 12/18/90------------------

Reposted from:  Tue, 18 Dec 90 21:34:21 EST

Some of you may be interested in this item from GOVDOC-L@PSUVM.

Jim
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date:         Mon, 10 Dec 90 11:42:00 EDT
From:         HANERFELDA@UNCWIL.BITNET
Subject:      NTDB

     The following information about the National Trade Data Bank
(NTDB) was written for an upcoming issue of The Docket,
Newsletter of the North Carolina Documents Section of the North
Carolina Library Association.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

               THE NATIONAL TRADE DATA BANK (NTDB)

     This CD-ROM product is produced by the U.S. Department of
Commerce and was recently distributed by the GPO.  It contains a
wealth of information -- over 100,000 documents, tables, and time
series from 15 federal government agencies.

     One of the files in the database is the Foreign Traders
Index, which is a directory of companies and organizations in
countries which have an interest in dealing with U.S. companies.
This file can be searched by country and product.

     Other files contain a wide variety of information.  I have
spent hours looking at the various files and am amazed at the
amount of information that can be retrieved from this product.
There are several full text files, such as The World Fact Book, A
Basic Guide to Exporting, Understanding United States Foreign
Trade Data, and the National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign
Trade Barriers.  The trends and forecasts tables from the 1990
U.S. Industrial Outlook are included, and the full text of the
1991 U.S. Industrial Outlook will be available.

     Some of the statistical files deal with topics such as
energy, interest rates, international labor, price indexes,
exchange rates, industry analyses, exports and imports, and
demographics.  The International Energy Database includes sixty
subfiles, and the Handbook of Economic Statistics includes a wide
variety of statistics for many countries.  Most of the files
contain several years of retrospective data.

     Several files listed on the menu, such as Business America,
are not available on this first disk, but will probably be
included on future releases.  The disk is supposed to be issued
monthly.

     The software allows you to search with "NTDB Browse," which
is menu driven, or "Romware," which has boolean search
capabilities.  I have not mastered the "Romware" mode, but have
been successful in using most of the browse features.  You can
print or download data, and many of the files require a wide
carriage printer.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Cassell                                    CASSELL@UNCVM1.OIT.UNC.EDU
Institute for Research in Social Science       CASSELL@UNCVM1.BITNET
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill       Phone:  919-962-0782
Chapel Hill, NC  27599-3355                    Fax:    919-962-4777
-------------------------------------------------------------------------