The United States Department of Commerce is the largest data collecting organization in the world. Its Bureau of the Census has the monumental job every ten years of conducting a population census; its Office of Business Economics has the important task of measuring the national income and computing the balance of international payments and is also nationally known for a family of publications including the scholarly monthly SURVEY OF CURRENT BUSINESS.

These data are intended primarily to provide statistical guidelines relative to the course of the domestic economy. However, a different kind of data collection activity is carried on regularly by the Department in the Bureau of International Programs and the Bureau of International Business Operations. These two bureaus have primary responsibility within the department for the promotion of United States foreign commerce and private international investments. Both are new organizational units created as of August 8, 1961 to replace the former Bureau of Foreign Commerce, and both are under the supervision of the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for International Affairs who is, in turn, responsible directly to the Secretary of Commerce. In announcing this reorganization in the department's international affairs' responsibilities, Secretary Hodges stated that the Commerce Department must “fulfill our role in formulating U.S. foreign economic policy especially as it affects the American business community. … We want to be in a position to advise both business and government on the imminent changes in world trade and investment resulting from regional economic integration, from the threat of the Sino Soviet Bloc, and from our own economic growth. We need better methods to evaluate and set upon developments abroad which have an impact on the U.S. foreign and domestic trade.”