Excerpt from the report: The marketing bill statistics presented in this article differ from those previously published. New estimates were made for Census Years 1947, 1954, and 1958 by the "commodity flow" method. Data for intervening years and 1959-65 were interpolated or extrapolated with the annual series formerly published. The commodity flow approach is believed to provide more accurate estimates. It utilizes data published by the Bureau of the Census and other organizations which were not used in deriving the old estimates. Product coverage is more explicit in the commodity flow method than in the former method which provided only implicit coverage of many consumer products, especially the newer products. In addition, the commodity flow procedure profiles annual data for commodity groups and data for marketing agencies in census years. When the commodity flow estimates for 1963 are available, the data for 1958-65 will be revised. Commodity flow estimates for 1929, 1935, and 1939, as well as for post-war years, and additional analyses of the data and a description of the method are contained in a bulletin planned for publication by the Economic Research Service.