www.MarketingProfs.com  articles & case studies about the value of marketing

www.trendwatching.com  global in focus-free subscription- info on the latest trends

www.nrf.com National Retail Federation- articles/data about retail and related topics such as, consumer spending

www.adcouncil.org get all the materials associated with Public Service Advertisements

Wanting an investment overview of Bangladesh?  Try the TCU database, CountryWatch.  Click on the “Country Reviews” tab at the top.  It also has lots of good stuff: Political overviews, Economic Overviews, Envrionmental Overviews, etc.

There is some overlap between the two databases, but there are also many unique features.

Wanting more?  Try Country Commercial Guides located in our database, StatUSA.  After entering the database, click on StatUSA again, and then Globus & NTDB, then scroll down to the link into Country Commercial Guides. 

Country Commerical Guides contain info such as, market conditions, best export sectors, trade regulations, marketing strategies, services for exporters, etc.  It’s our government’s attempt to help business exports/imports.

Useful (and reliable) websites include:  www.buyusa.gov

www.cia.gov - click on the World Factbook link on the right side of the page

http://www.site-by-site.com/  An international investment portal

http://globaledge.msu.edu/  a portal to learning resources on global business activities

http://www.doingbusiness.org/downloads/  business regulations and enforcement information

Check out the country tag and the international tag in my delicious account for more!

The pdf is lengthy, but it contains several reports (I am paraphrasing BLS’ descriptions of each report below):

• The births and deaths of business establishments in the United States- Basically a report that discusses the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) attempt to better measure business start-ups and failures (as an indication of entrepreneurship).  The bonus is that they provide lots of statistics on this topic.
• Expenditure patterns of young single adults: two recent generations compared- A report comparing the spending habits of “young, never-married adults in 2004-05 and their counterparts in 1984-85.”
• Business Processes and Business Functions: a new way of looking at employment- BLS created a new classification system and combined it with their Mass Layoff Statistics to gain a new perspective on employment.
• Service-providing occupations, offshoring, and the labor market- An analysis of service-providing occupations’ susceptbility to offshoring.

The Monthy Labor Report is produced by the U.S. Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics.  I am linking you to the December 2008 report.

Here’s the short version for those in a hurry (click on the hyperlinked text to get the complete answer directly from the census bureau with a cherry on top!):

Census tracts are subdivisions of a county.  Although these boundaries are fairly stable, they do change from one census survey year to another.  A census tract contains about 4,000 inhabitants. 

What info can I get at the census tract level?  The only data being reported at the census tract level is information contained in Summary Files 1-4 of the Decennial Census (the last one was conducted in 2000).  Click on this link to get to the Decennial Census. 

Here is the Census Bureau’s description of the information contained within Summary Files 1-4 of the Decennial Census: 

“Summary File 1 presents counts and information [age, sex, race, Hispanic/Latino origin, household relationship, whether residence is owned or rented] collected from all people and housing units.

Summary File 2 Population and housing characteristics iterated for many detailed race and Hispanic or Latino categories, and American Indian and Alaska Native tribes.

Summary File 3 presents detailed population and housing data (such as place of birth, education, employment status, income, value of housing unit, year structure built) collected from a 1-in-6 sample and weighted to represent the total population.

Summary File 4 contains tabulations of population and housing data collected from a sample of the population. The data are shown down to the census tract level for 336 race, Hispanic or Latino, American Indian and Alaska Native, and ancestry categories.”

For directions on how to navigate through the Summary Files when you have a specific census tract number, go here.

For directions on how to obtain census tract numbers for a state, county, etc. go here

Hope this helps!  Leave a comment if you have anything to add or need me to find something else.

Gallup Poll News Service       

Description: The Gallup Poll News Service is the internet’s leading polling-based news source.  The Gallup Poll News Service provides news centered on public opinion. Published each business day, articles from the Gallup Poll News Service analyze findings and trends in politics, business, social issues, and Americans’ lifestyles.

Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing  

Description: The Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing is Gallup’s premier weekly online news publication.  Each Tuesday, the Gallup Poll Tuesday Briefing publishes in-depth articles on the opinions and issues Gallup is investigating in government, in the workplace, in schools, in hospitals, and in faith communities.

Those needing opinion poll data should also try using the Polls & Surveys SmartIndexing term in combination with news searches run from the Power Search form or the News search form. This will retrieve news stories that report on the contents of public opinion polls.

To only search a specific publication, you can click on the Source tab in LexisNexis Academic and then search for Gallup Polls in the “Find a Source” search box.  You must then select the publication title, click the “Ok-Continue” box, and it will allow you to search only within the publication you selected.