Tuesday is when we’re supposed to learn more about how imports and exports have been faring from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though the 43-day government shutdown may still delay that data release.

Until recently, this wasn’t data that Tyler Schipper, an associate professor of economics at the University of St. Thomas, paid all that much attention to.

But lately, with tariffs in the news, “import prices have been one of the reports that people have been going to, and, likewise, that's one of the probably top two or three reports that I am waiting to see for the backlog,” he said.

The BLS data measures import prices before tariffs are applied. That can point to who might be absorbing the cost of the import taxes.

If import prices go up, “that seems to suggest that foreign exporters are not actually doing much cost-sharing, that they are passing most of the prices of tariffs onto the U.S.,” Schipper said.

Import prices also affect consumers, per Ryan Monarch at Syracuse University.

“Ten percent of all their expenditures are on imported products. And so sometimes import prices will be something that is moving overall inflation numbers around,” he said.

Missing the September import data during the shutdown has made it harder to understand what’s going on, according to Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State University. He gave the example of metal products, which were hit with steep tariff increases in August.

“We don't have a sense yet of how that has been met by exporters to the U.S., in terms of potentially lowering prices or not to help offset those things,” he said, “and so that has hampered ability to essentially understand the degree that importers are seeing their margins strained because of these tariffs.”

BLS will be able to catch up on the import price data it’s missed, Miller added, because companies keep records of the prices they paid.