§ Mr. Austin Mitchellasked the Chancellor of the Exchequer, further to his reply dated 14 November 1979 concerning relative normal unit labour costs, whether he will publish in the Official Report figures showing the degree of accuracy attained by the various measures of competitiveness since 1970 and, in particular, which have had a higher explanatory power for the trend of trade in manufactures than relative export prices for manufactures.
34W
§ Mr. LawsonInformation on the performance of different measures of competitiveness in modelling trade flows is given in the article in theBank of England Quarterly Bulletin for June 1978 to which I referred in my reply on 14 November 1979. Some additional information was published in Treasury working paper No. 6, "A Study of UK Imports of Manufactures" in August 1978, of which a copy is available in the Library. Information on many different indices of competitiveness is published in Economic Trends in the Monthly Review of External Trade Statistics and in International Financial Statistics.