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Sir Keir Starmer uses a long -standing statistical earthquake to strengthen his attempts to reject Donald Trump’s threatening tariff tariffs, relying on US data showing that the UK is one of the few major economies with which America has a trade excess.
British ministers focus on US data in conversations with officials in Trump’s administration, because his methodology is more useful to their cause than in the UK.
“Using their own American trade data provides a common and strong foundation when participating in conversations with our American friends,” a senior British official joked.
According to the US data, America performed the total trade surplus with the UK in 2023, in the amount of $ 14.5 billion. This puts Britain at a favorable position as Trump threatens tariffs with targeted countries with a significant deficit.
However, the National Statistics Office reports that the UK in the United States has carried out a trade surplus with £ 71.4 billion, or about $ 89 billion, 2023.
Trump has threatened the criminal tariffs to the countries with which they now manage a trade deficit, although it seems to be his focus of goods, not services.
While most of the British trade balance with the USA service, 2023, the country reported on a small excess of goods of goods with USA of about $ 3 billion. This is still in contrast to the Seni store of $ 9.7 billion, US reports from the UK.
Starmer and Lord Mandelson, a new ambassador to the UK in Washington, claim that Trump should spare Britain from any general application of tariffs with respect to the trade position between the two countries.
Statistical offices throughout the Atlantic are aware of the difference and cooperate to harmonize the data from 2017. Both pointed out that differences are higher when measuring trade in services.
Trade asymmetry are common and differences “can be caused by a series of conceptual and measuring variations between the practice of assessing different countries,” warned.
The key question in the UK data is the treatment of crown addiction, three territories of offshore island in the British islands that self -manage the estates of the British crown.
The American Bureau for economic analysis includes a trade with Jersey, Guernsey and the island of Man in the UK, while ONS does not.
Considering that Jersey hoses over 35,000 financial companies that run more than £ 450 billion, this omission has a significant impact.
America reports on export of $ 4.8 billion more in the UK services than imports, while the UK claims to export almost £ 70 billion in the United States than imports.
The UK said that the exclusion of the dependence on the crown from British trade data is in accordance with the European account system.
U.S. Statistics Office said “It will investigate the feasibility of changing the instruments to collect data in order to exclude these addiction from its geographical definition of the United Kingdom.” This is something that many officials in the UK may not want to happen yet.
An analysis According to HM revenues and customs in the asymmetry of the trade in the UK, it does not seem to solve the problem.
Prior to 2022, the goods of the US origin that cleaned the EU customs in the Second EU country before arriving in the UK, counting as European imports. This makes it difficult to compare with us data.
“This explains the negative asymmetry,” the analysis states.
The study refers to negative asymmetry when US exports to the UK are larger than the appropriate import in the UK from the USA.
Since 2022, Imports in the UK from the USA based on the state of origin should be comparable to US exports to the UK. “Instead, there is a positive asymmetry of 2022, which cannot be explained,” the analysis concluded.
