Identifying Foreign Suppliers in U.S. Merchandise Import Transactions

International trade data capturing relationships between importing and exporting firms provides new insight into the activity of trading firms, but the quality of such disaggregated data is unknown. In this paper, we assess the reliability of two-sided data from the United States by comparing the number of foreign suppliers from U.S. import data to origin-country data. Such exporter counts tend to be lower than the same counts from raw U.S. data. We propose and implement a set of methods that align the totals more closely. Overall, our analysis presents broad support for usage of U.S. data to study buyer-supplier relationships