# Glossary of Terms

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| Term | Definition |
|------|------------|
| **Assessment** | Intratec's published value for a price or cost, produced by its methodology. |
| **Assessment basis** | The specification a value refers to: location, grade/quality, and delivery terms. |
| **CAPEX (Capital expenditures)** | The investment cost of building or expanding a plant. |
| **Capital investment** | Total capital required to bring a plant into operation. |
| **Cash cost** | The recurring out-of-pocket operating cost, excluding capital recovery. |
| **cfr (Cost and Freight)** | An Incoterm: price includes cost and freight to the destination port, excluding insurance. |
| **cif (Cost, Insurance and Freight)** | An Incoterm: price includes cost, insurance, and freight to the destination port. |
| **Commodity family** | One of the seven industry groups the IIE covers (e.g. Polymers, Fertilizers). |
| **Compiled price** | A price built from validated public-source series, cleaned of anomalies and averaged over the month. |
| **Contract price** | A price for supply under contract terms, as opposed to spot. |
| **ddp (Delivered Duty Paid)** | An Incoterm: the seller delivers goods cleared for import, with all costs and duties paid. |
| **Final (Fi)** | Data status label for verified official statistics. |
| **Forecast (F)** | Data status label for a forward-looking model prediction. |
| **Foundation pillar** | One of the 8 base pillars applied to every commodity family. |
| **Industry-Specific pillar** | One of the 6 pillars evaluated separately per commodity family. |
| **ISBL (Inside Battery Limits)** | The core process units of a plant. |
| **Location factor** | A multiplier for relative plant construction cost between countries (reference = 1.00). |
| **Netback** | A value at the loading terminal, derived by subtracting freight from a destination price. |
| **Netforward** | A value at the destination terminal, derived by adding freight to a loading price. |
| **Normalization** | Aligning values to a common basis so figures are comparable. |
| **OSBL (Outside Battery Limits)** | Supporting infrastructure of a plant (utilities, storage, offsites). |
| **Pillar** | One dimension of competitiveness, scored 0–100. |
| **Preliminary (P)** | Data status label for a model estimate used while official data is unavailable. |
| **Productivity-adjusted** | A cost weighed against output per worker (most efficient = 1.0×). |
| **Rank** | A country's position from 1 (most competitive) to 33 (least) within the benchmarking set. |
| **Reference dataset** | An absolute-value dataset provided alongside the 0–100 scores. |
| **Score** | A 0–100 value summarizing competitiveness; 50 = global mean. |
| **Tier band** | A third of the ranking: Upper (1–11), Mid (12–22), Lower (23–33). |
| **Transaction price** | A filtered trade-based price reflecting a mid-market level. |
| **Unit value** | A raw trade aggregate: total value divided by total quantity. |