Beyond Borders: Exploring IMPLAN's New US Foreign Trade Data

INTRODUCTION

IMPLAN has long accounted for foreign import and export values as part of its regional economic impact models. The addition of US Foreign Trade Data now provides detailed data on what is being traded, how much is being traded, and whom it’s being traded with. Whether you're analyzing a local economy's exposure to global supply chain disruptions, supporting a regional export strategy, or simply adding context to an impact study, this data opens up a new dimension of analysis. This article walks you through what the data is, where it comes from, and a few ways you might put it to work.

WHAT’S NEW? 

IMPLAN's Data Library now includes US Foreign Trade Data. This expanded trade dataset breaks down the United States' imports and exports by both commodity and trading partner countries. Rather than seeing a single aggregate value for "total foreign exports of Sector X," you can now see exactly how much of that commodity is being traded with Canada, Germany, China, Mexico, and so on.

The data is currently available for 2023–2024 across all 528 Commodities, at the national, state,  and county levels. It can be accessed in the Data Library under both the Explores and Dashboards tabs. 

WHAT’S BEHIND THE DATA?

The Foreign Trade Data is built from two primary sources, depending on commodity type.

For shippable goods, trading partner detail comes from the US Census Bureau's Merchandise Trade data — the same underlying source IMPLAN uses to produce foreign import and export values for goods each year.

For services, trading partner detail comes from the OECD's Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) tables — the same source used to produce inter-country trade flows in IMPLAN's International Data.

After mapping both sources to IMPLAN commodity sectors, each country's share of total imports or exports for a given commodity is calculated. Those shares are then applied to IMPLAN's final values for total foreign trade, effectively distributing each commodity's trade volume across its partner countries.

The list of trading partner countries aligns with the countries included in the ICIO tables. Any countries not individually represented in the ICIO database are grouped into a Global Remainder region, so the full picture of trade is always accounted for.

HOW TO ACCESS THE DATA

US Foreign Trade Data is available in the Data Library in two formats — a Dashboard and an Explores view. If you're new to Data Library, check out What is Data Library and How Do I Use It? for a full walkthrough of how to get started.

DASHBOARD

Navigate to Data Library > Dashboards > US Foreign Trade. The Dashboard provides a table of commodity trade flows between the US and its partner countries. It allows you to see foreign exports, foreign imports, and balance of trade, for a full picture of international trade.

The Dashboard includes a set of filters which allow you to narrow down millions of trade data points into a specific "slice" of the economy. 

Here is a breakdown of how each one functions within the IMPLAN Foreign Trade Data Library:

• Commodity —This is your primary "What" based on the IMPLAN commodity sector.
• State / County Name — These filters define the U.S. side of the trade. If you select "Cook County, IL," you are looking specifically at goods/services leaving or entering that specific county’s borders.
• Country— This defines the International side of the trade. It allows you to see the specific trading partner (e.g., Germany, Vietnam) involved in the exchange with your selected U.S. geography.
• Dollar Type — Choose between Real or Nominal dollars. When Dollar Type is Real, Nominal dollar values are adjusted for inflation/deflation such that each dollar value Measures will be displayed in the selected Dollar Year(s). Dollar Year only applies when Dollar Type is Real. 
• Data Year — Currently available for 2023 and 2024
• Dollar Year — This sets the "Base Year" for your currency. If you choose 2024, all values—even for the 2023 data year—will be converted into the purchasing power of a 2024 dollar.
• Aggregation — Currently available in the 528 Unaggregated industry set.

The US Foreign Trade Dashboard data table includes the following columns:

• Commodity - The specific good or service being traded, categorized by IMPLAN’s commodity sectoring scheme.
• Country - The specific nation receiving exports from or providing imports to the selected U.S. region.
• Foreign Export - The monetary value of goods/services produced within your study area that are sold to a foreign entity. This represents money flowing into the local economy.
• Foreign Import - The monetary value of goods/services produced abroad and consumed within your study area. This represents leakage from the local economy.
• Balance of Trade - Calculated as Foreign Exports - Foreign Imports. A positive value indicates a trade surplus (the region is a net provider); a negative value indicates a trade deficit.
• Foreign Export Share of Total - This is the percentage that a specific commodity-country pair contributes to the total value of all foreign exports.
• Foreign Import Share of Total - This is the percentage that a specific commodity-country pair contributes to the total value of all foreign imports.

EXPLORES

Navigate to Data Library > Explores > US Foreign Trade Data. The Explores view gives you a more flexible, table-based interface for querying the data — ideal if you want to export specific cuts of the data or dig into the numbers at a granular level. The same filtering dimensions available in the Dashboard are accessible here, giving you full control over how you slice and view the data.

USE CASE EXAMPLES

The following examples illustrate a few of the practical applications for IMPLAN's US Foreign Trade Data. This comprehensive new data can be used to add greater context to economic analyses, whether you are examining a local economy’s global supply chain exposure, benchmarking a region’s export strategy, or simply adding a supporting narrative to a standard impact study.

EXAMPLE ONE: UNDERSTANDING SUPPLY CHAIN EXPOSURE

Suppose you're conducting an economic analysis for a client in the semiconductor manufacturing space and want to understand where that industry's imported inputs are coming from. Using the Foreign Trade Data, you can identify which countries account for the largest share of semiconductor-related commodity imports into the US — say, Taiwan, South Korea, or Japan. This gives your analysis important context about geographic concentration risk and can inform policy discussions around domestic production incentives or trade diversification strategies.

EXAMPLE TWO: BENCHMARKING A STATE’S EXPORT PROFILE

Because the data is available at both the state and county level, you can use it to understand how a local economy's trade activity compares to the broader state picture. Say you're working with an economic development organization in a coastal county with a significant fishing and seafood processing industry. You could pull the county-level export data for food manufacturing commodities and compare the top destination countries against the state average. If the county is sending a disproportionate share of exports to Japan or South Korea relative to the state as a whole, that's a meaningful finding — one that could inform targeted trade promotion efforts, justify infrastructure investments at local ports, or support a grant application highlighting the county's outsized role in the state's international trade network.

EXAMPLE THREE: UNDERSTANDING TRADE DEPENDENCY

Foreign Trade Data can be a powerful complement to a standard impact analysis. Say you're modeling the economic impact of a proposed automotive manufacturing plant in a Midwestern state. Before you even run the analysis, you can use the Foreign Trade Data to understand how trade-exposed the auto manufacturing sector already is in that state — how much of its output is exported and to which countries, and how much of its inputs are imported and from where. If the data shows that a large share of inputs come from a single country, that context adds real depth to your findings and may be worth highlighting in your report as a consideration for supply chain resilience. It's the kind of supporting narrative that elevates an analysis from a table of numbers to a genuinely useful decision-making tool.

A FEW THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

The data is currently available for 2023–2024 only.

• All 528 Industries and Commodities are covered, at the national, state, and county level.
• The Global Remainder region captures trade with countries not individually listed in the ICIO tables — it's not a gap in the data, just a catch-all for smaller or less-tracked trading partners.
• This data lives in the Data Library and is separate from the input-output  modeling application, so think of it as a research and context tool rather than a direct modeling input.

CONCLUSION

Foreign trade doesn't happen in a vacuum, and neither should economic analysis. With US Foreign Trade Data now available at the national, state, and county level across all 528 Industries and Commodities, IMPLAN users have a richer set of tools for understanding how local and regional economies connect to the rest of the world. Explore the data in the Data Library — and if you find a use case we haven't thought of yet, we'd love to hear about it!

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Written April 8th 2026