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Log BEA's answer on where hospital exports come from (#658) - #1307

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BEA (William Jolliff) answered our question about the source of hospital exports (622000, #658). This PR records the answer in bedrock/analysis/nowcasting/bea_correspondence.md. It also updates the health care trade note in bedrock/transform/trade/README.md, which still said the hospital row was set to the published summary "until BEA confirms the source". It changes only documentation, and the build stays the same.

What BEA said. Hospital exports are built from two series in ITA Table 2.1:

  • Exports of health services (line 100)
  • A portion of technical, trade-related, and other business services (line 77)

Why nothing in the build changes.

  • Line 100 is suppressed for 2017–2021 and is $0.8–1.0 billion in 2022–2024. BEA's hospital exports are $2.8 billion in 2017 and $14.1 billion in 2024, so most of the hospital row comes from the share of line 77, which BEA does not publish.
  • That share is not fixed. Line 77 grows from $36.2 billion to $54.0 billion over 2017–2024, and hospitals' part of it goes from at most about 8% to about 25%. It also keeps rising in 2020, when line 77 falls. No published series can stand in for it, so 622000 stays on BEA's published summary exports (the same treatment as in fix(trade): book health travel as travel and control hospital trade on the published summary (#658) #1180).

Something to check later. Our export bridge sends line 77's component series to other rows, such as engineering, leasing, trade-related services and waste treatment. If hospitals take a growing part of line 77 in BEA's tables, those rows grow faster in ours than in BEA's. Conditioning service exports on the published summary (#1250, PR #1303) caps this by summary row, so look for it when grading that rebuild.

Docs only, so no CI gates are needed.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

WesIngwersen and others added 2 commits November 13, 2026 11:23
BEA builds hospital exports from ITA health services (Table 2.1 line 100)
plus an unpublished portion of technical, trade-related, and other business
services (line 77). No change to the build: 622000 stays on the published
summary.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
#658)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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