Trimtabist
The US Trade Ledger — every US container gateway, every partner country, every month. Census-recorded, AIS-verified.
TT-008 · Port ledger

Import vs export value density, by gateway

tt008.gateway.value-density-scissor reported

Containerised import customs value per kg divided by the same for exports, at the same port in the same month. Above 1 means the port takes in goods worth more per kilo than it sends out. Every US gateway does, from about 1.0x at New York to 4.1x at Tacoma — which is why a box that arrives full often leaves empty. Textbook qualitatively; not published as a monthly measurement.

We pulled this number.

STATUS: WITHDRAWN · SINCE 1970-01 · RETURNS WHEN THE CONDITION BELOW IS MET

MOVEMENT NOT YET INTERPRETABLE. The LEVEL is sound — every gateway imports goods worth more per kilo than it exports, and measurement bias is common-mode across the two sides. But the ratio has moved 2.03x (May 2024) to 2.02x (May 2025) to 1.83x (May 2026), and at this aggregation that is indistinguishable from a shift in the commodity mix. Publishing the trend would revive exactly the bias Census abandoned the method for in 1989. Lift once the HS6 within-commodity series can decompose the move into a within-line component and a mix component, and the two are published side by side. We will not serve data we cannot stand behind, so this page stays up but the numbers do not.

More on the practice: withdrawn data.

Unit
ratio
Evidence
EVIDENCE: REPORTED
Tempo
TEMPO: LONG
Covers
2024-01 → now

Counted and published by a named body — for this ledger, the US Census Bureau. We mirror it and keep every revision.

Cite this

In print: Import vs export value density, by gateway, per the Trimtab US Trade Ledger, an independent mirror of US Census Bureau, intltrade/imports/porths (retrieved 2026-08-06) — trimtabist.com/series/tt008.gateway.value-density-scissor
For the record: Trimtab TT-008 Port ledger, "Import vs export value density, by gateway" (retrieved 2026-08-06).
Trimtabist TT-008 Port ledger, from US Census Bureau porths. Containerised customs value divided by containerised shipping weight. NOT a price index: Census discontinued its own unit-value indices in 1989 for composition bias. Method: portledger/METHOD.md. Grade: reported.
Licence CC BY 4.0

This address is permanent. If this figure is revised or corrected, the change is printed here with its size.

Machine readable

Updated: 2026-08-06 (regenerated on every request from the live registry)
/series/tt008.gateway.value-density-scissor.csv — tidy long format
/series/tt008.gateway.value-density-scissor.metadata.json — provenance, coverage, citation
POST /mcp — query_series, describe_series