U.S. federal agencies involved in economic data want to change the way they classify companies that have outsourced their U.S. production to foreign manufacturing companies.
They are proposing to reclassify these "wholesale traders" as "domestic manufacturers."
This means that their sales would be counted as U.S. production and their products that are made offshore and imported into the United States for sale would no longer be counted as imports.
As reported in the Aug. 20 issue of Manufacturing & Technology News, the purpose of this change is supposedly "to determine how much products are been offshored and to pinpoint the number of American companies that are linked to manufacturing, even though they don't make the products they design and sell."
For more, read "Why it is Important to Know Where Products Are Manufactured" in sister publication IndustryWeek.