Commerce Department, PayPal to share data on US exports

In a joint blog post, Commerce’s Chief Data Officer Ian Kalin announced that PayPal has committed to sharing data on US export transactions, in a bid to give US large and small companies, insights into international hot spots for export sales.

This collaboration is organized as a Working Group under the Commerce Data Advisory Council (CDAC), a Federal Advisory Council whose mission is to provide advice and recommendations to Secretary Penny Pritzker and Federal government leaders on how to make commerce data easier to find, access, use, and combine with other data.

Initial experiments with available data indicate that some of the best opportunities may be in providing business owners with targeted benchmarks and opportunity assessments. For example, the US Census Bureau collects country and product trade data. Data sets like these enable the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to publish international transactions reports, which themselves also fuel data products like international investment statistics and reports on the digital economy and cross-border trade. Mashing up information resources like these with PayPals own data networks could lead to customizable and highly valuable new insights, according to the blog post.

Given the early stage of the data science experiments, it is not clear what the final product resulting out of the Working Group with PayPal and the US Department of Commerce will look like.