Trade Statistics (Hansard, 6 December 1993)

§ Mr. Cash
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer if the Central Statistical Office will assess the costs and benefits of collecting, analysing and publishing a full geographical breakdown of invisible trade, country by country, on the same basis as that which is published on visible trade.

§ Mr. Nelson
The Central Statistical Office is currently reviewing with its data suppliers the need for, and the cost of, collecting more geographical detail on United Kingdom invisible trade. For some components of invisible trade, very detailed information is already available and published, for example, travel credits and debits. For other components, for example, financial services, such information would be expensive to collect and would impose a high burden on reporting businesses. In some cases, notably investment income, there are difficult conceptual problems—it is sometimes not clear who the foreign counterpart is for some types of transaction.
Given these difficulties the Central Statistical Office has no current plans to collect a full geographical breakdown of invisible trade country by country. The Central Statistical Office, however, keeps such matters under review.

§ Mr. Cash
To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what are his future plans for publishing detailed statistics of visible United Kingdom trade with each of the present and future individual member states of the EC.

§ Mr. Nelson
Regular publication of statistics of trade with individual members of the European Union has now restarted following the introduction of a new statistical system on 1 January. Detailed monthly data are available through marketing agents appointed by Her Majesty's Customs and Excise. Summaries are published monthly in Business Monitor MM20A "Overseas Trade Statistics of the UK with the World". Details at commodity code level are published quarterly in Business Monitor MQ20, "Overseas Trade Statistics of the UK with countries within the EC". The Central Statistical Office will shortly begin publishing seasonally adjusted estimates of trade with individual members of the European Union-without any commodity detail—in its first releases and on their database, access to which is available through the Library of the House.
Data are available for countries which are not members of the European Union from a similar range of publication and sources.