December 19, 2014
This week, Secretary Pritzker was in Chicago for the 25th
U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade with U.S. Trade Representative
Froman, Secretary Vilsack, and a high-level Government of China delegation led by Vice Premier Wang
Yang. It was a fruitful series of meetings that resulted in key outcomes
in the areas of agricultural market access, intellectual property rights
protection, innovation policies, and competition law enforcement. She also
appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN’s New Day, and CNBC’s Squawk Box to
discuss President Obama’s actions to change U.S. policy towards Cuba.
Around Commerce, NOAA contributed to the Presidential
Task Force on Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing and Seafood Fraud,
MBDA has tips on writing a business plan and NTIA highlighted their stewardship
of the wireless spectrum.
Commerce Week at a Glance will take the next two weeks
off. We’ll return on Friday, January 9, 2015.
JCCT
Day One Emphasizes a Shared Vision of Global Economic Partnership - Thirty-one
years after the JCCT’s inception, Secretary Pritzker, Ambassador Froman and
Vice Premier Wang Yang committed to re-imagining the JCCT. Their hope is for
the JCCT to serve as more of a platform for government leaders to hear from the
business community, as well as continue to serve as a forum for addressing
bilateral trade and investment issues and promoting commercial opportunities
between the United States and China. For the first time, the JCCT schedule
included a full day of events designed to facilitate private sector engagement
with officials from the U.S. and Chinese governments.
25th
U.S.-China Joint Commission on Commerce and Trade Concludes with Key Outcomes
- At the conclusion of the JCCT discussions, the United States announced key
outcomes in the areas of agricultural market access, intellectual property
rights protection, innovation policies, and competition law enforcement.
Secretary
Penny Pritzker’s Statement on President Obama's Announcement on Cuba - President
Obama and I believe deeply in the power of commercial diplomacy to change lives
and economies for the better. We are putting this belief to the test in Cuba.
Everyone deserves an opportunity to increase prosperity for themselves and
their families, and to that end, I look forward to visiting Cuba to lead our
efforts to expand our commercial diplomacy as part of the President’s
initiative to encourage positive change in Cuba.
Presidential
Task Force Issues Recommendations to Level Playing Field for U.S. Fishermen
- The U.S. government took additional steps to level the playing field for
legitimate U.S. fishermen, and ensure the vitality of marine fish stocks. The
Presidential Task Force on Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing
and Seafood Fraud, co-chaired by the Departments of State and Commerce,
released 15 recommendations to combat IUU fishing and seafood fraud and
increase consumer confidence in the sustainability of seafood sold in the
U.S.
Challenging
Mission, Strong Team - Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Mark Doms writes
about how the Economic and Statistics Administration is meeting the challenges
of providing timely, relevant, and high-quality data about the United States'
population and economy.
Keep
Your Holidays Happy and Your Impact Low - Across the United States, the
winter holiday season is upon us and many people are gathering with family and
friends to celebrate. But as you go about trimming trees, lighting candles, and
nipping eggnog, keep in mind a few tips for lowering your impact on the ocean. After
all, a clean and healthy environment sounds like a great gift to give others.
Tech
Week 2014: Optimizing Patent Examiner Training through Volunteer Experts - The
first week in December, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)
held Tech Week, an opportunity for representatives from corporations, universities,
and other organizations to showcase innovations in their field for its patent
examiners. Such training, part of its Patent Examiner Technical Training
Program, helps ensure patent examiners truly understand the state of the art in
the technologies and disciplines in which they consider granting patents.
Guidance
on Subject Matter Eligibility Issued - Following the valuable feedback that
we received from the public through written comments and multiple public
meetings over the last several months, the USPTO is issuing new examination
guidance on subject matter eligibility under § 101 in view of the U.S. Supreme
Court’s recent decisions in Alice Corp., Myriad, and Mayo. You can find the
guidance in a Federal Register notice officially published on December 16,
2014, entitled “2014 Interim Guidance on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility.”
Have
You Written Your Business Plan Yet? - This month is National Write a
Business Plan Month. MBDA’s Business Plan Writer is a free and easy tool that
lets you to create your business plan online. Check out this step-by-step tool
for writing a business plan.
NOAA’s
National Hurricane Center Implements New Products to Help U.S. Coastal
Communities Become More Resilient - This year the Commerce Department's
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Hurricane Center
introduced an experimental five-day Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook to
complement its text-only product for both the Atlantic and eastern North
Pacific basins. This new outlook provided easy to understand graphics depicting
the likelihood of development and the potential formation areas of new tropical
cyclones over a five day period.
Operational
Excellence in Federal Spectrum Management - One of the core functions of
the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information
Administration (NTIA) is to manage federal uses of wireless spectrum to make
the most efficient use of this precious resource. It’s complex, technical work
performed by a team of resourceful engineers who labor behind the scenes to
ensure that federal agencies have the radio spectrum they need to perform all
sorts of mission-critical functions.
Increasing
the Reach of Census Bureau Data - Census Bureau has undertaken a
comprehensive digital transformation effort, developing new tools using the
latest technologies. Almost 50 million
people visit Census.gov annually, and we’ve made major improvements to the site
so that they can more easily find the information they want. We also created an
application programming interface (API) to increase the accessibility and
usability of our data. The API gives developers quick and easy access to an
ever-increasing pool of publicly available data, allowing them to create Web or
mobile apps. More than 7,000 developers have requested access to the API, and
the databases have been queried more than 600 million times. Because these apps
subsequently reach new users, they have the added benefit of increasing the
circulation of our demographic, socioeconomic and housing statistics even more.
On
the Road: Meeting with Dallas Public Safety Officials - TJ Kennedy,
FirstNet's Acting General Manager, was in Dallas for the LTE North America
Conference and met with local public safety personnel, including Dallas
Fire-Rescue Chief Louie Bright, who leads a 2,000-person staff that serves one
of most populous metropolitan areas in the country.
Building
Data-Driven Workforce Solutions - Guest blog post by Chauncy Lennon, Senior
Program Director on Workforce Initiatives at JP Morgan Chase Foundation, wrote
a blog post about his involvement and plans serving on the Department of
Commerce’s National Advisory Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The
Manufacturing and International Trade Report - On December 18, 2014, the
U.S. Census Bureau released the 2012 Manufacturing and International Trade
Report (MITR). This new annual report contains manufacturing data on the value
of product shipments. The data are published on a North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS) basis from the 2012 Economic Census Industry Series. The MITR
also includes official U.S. export and import merchandise trade statistics.
The Economic and Statistics Administration investigated “How
Much Competition Exists Among ISPs?” on their blog this week.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis wrote State
Personal Income: Third Quarter 2014; U.S.
Current-Account Deficit Increases in Third Quarter 2014; Travel
and Tourism Spending Decelerated in the Third Quarter of 2014 on their blog
this week.
The U.S.
current account deficit increased to $100.3 billion, or 2.3 percent of
current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) in the third quarter of 2014, from
$98.4 billion (revised), or 2.3 percent of GDP in the second quarter
Building
permits in November 2014 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR)
of 1,035,000, down 5.2 percent from the revised October rate and down 0.2
percent from November 2013. Housing starts in November 2014 were at a SAAR of
1,028,000, down 1.6 percent from October and down 7.0 percent from November
2013.
Commerce Data in the News: The Washington Post cites the Census Bureau’s latest small area
income and poverty estimates to write
that more than 80 percent of counties in New Mexico and Mississippi have a school-age
poverty rate above the national average in the article A
Tremendous Number of School Children in America Still Live in Poverty.
USA Today cites
Census Bureau data on employment and marital status to write that gaming
services workers had one of the highest divorce rates relative to other
occupations in the article 5
of the Worst Jobs for a Relationship. The others are massage therapist,
waiter/bartender, athlete/entertainer and high-stress jobs (policeman,
firefighter, etc.).
NBC News cites
the Census Bureau’s report on young adults, based on data from the American
Community Survey, to write that the large portions of the country will consist
of a multitude of ancestries sharing
the same trains and parks and grocery stores in the
article Millennials Are Increasingly Non-White,
Foreign-Born, and Bilingual
The Economics and Statistics Administration report that examines
competition among broadband service providers was covered in Ars Technica”s
“100Mbps
Internet available to 59% of US, while gigabit still at just 3%”.
Data Releases Next Week: Gross Domestic Product (Third): 2014 Q3 (BEA); Personal Income and
Outlays: November (BEA); Advance Report on Durable Goods: November (Census);
New Residential Sales: November (Census)
The U.S. Department of Commerce will be closed on
December 25, 2014 for the Christmas holiday.
The
U.S. Department of Commerce will be closed on December 26, 2014 in accordance
with Presidential Executive Order.
Secretary
Pritzker, Ambassador Froman and Vice Premier Yang took questions from the
audience after speaking at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs' US-China: A
Shared Vision of Global Economic Partnership.
Bonus
Photos of the Week: A
slideshow of the 25th Session of the U.S.-China Joint Commission
on Commerce and Trade.
Secretary Pritzker appeared on MSNBC’s Morning
Joe to discuss the change of U.S.
policy toward Cuba. (scroll to 3:24)
Poverty
Rates of School-Age Population by County: 2013 — The Census Bureau released
a color-coded map that shows the poverty rate of children in all 3,400 counties
across the country.
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