November was another bad month for UK external accounts. The UK's deficit on trade in goods and services was £4.5 billion, compared with the deficit of £3.9 billion in October.Both imports and exports are falling, but exports are falling faster. So despite the dramatic fall in sterling, which should have boosted UK competitiveness, we still can not shift sufficient exports to narrow our external deficit.
5 comments:
"we still can not shift sufficient exports":our potential customers are going bust. To see how we are doing against our competitors, you'd need to do a direct comparison, I suppose.
Better than the -35% export drops in Asia and all the unemployment that entails.
Great news though.
There's a sale on at Land of Leather.
I wondered to myself why it is that our manufacturing isn't more resilient being that it’s the meat not the fat.
It occurred to me that we specialise in the expensive end of manufacturing, making the finished goods that require very high levels of skill and innovation.
This means that it can't be replicated elsewhere cheap and easy, and means our high wages and costs don't harm sales to much.
Problem is that they're expensive though and it seems that the world is learning to do without expensive things at the moment so all our plus points count for nothing, and not even sterling can save UK manufacturing.
I think you have confused the German economy with the UK economy
The German econom is high wage, high productivity, ours is mainly a screw driver assembly - where the high knowledge work is done elsewhere e.g. germany, japan etc
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