Overseas Trade and the Balance of Payments

Long historical time series of trade data

The overseas trade section of Millennium of Macroeconomic Data v3.1 (xls), has a considerable amount of aggregate and disaggregated trade data derived from the work of numerous scholars which stretch back to the C13th. Some of the key summary data are available to visualise on FRED.

Other useful compendia of trade statistics for the C19th and interwar periods can be found below:

• British & Foreign Trade And Industry 1854-1908 (170MB)
• Statistical Tables Relating to British & Foreign Trade & Industry 1924-1930 Part I (173MB)
• Statistical Tables Relating to British & Foreign Trade & Industry 1924-1930 Part II (237MB)
• Volume & Value of Our Overseas Trade 1924-1939 (345MB)

Historical official balance of payments data - the pre-BPM5 UK balance of payments 1948-1997

Historical official data on the balance of payments has been reconstructed on behalf of the ONS by Anne Harrison, editor of the 2008 System of National Accounts, the international standard on which the ESA is based. This dataset covers the balance of payments as they were presented annually in the Pink Books and quarterly in Economic Trends and, from 1992, in United Kingdom Economic Accounts (UKEA) in the period prior to 1998. The data throughout are consistent with the last quarterly data based on the classifications and definitions in Pink Book 1997 and represent the official balance of payments as they were known and understood at that time. The international guidelines on the compilation of national accounts were revised in 1993 and were implemented from 1998 onwards when the ONS changed their methodologies to adopt more rigorously the conventions of IMFs Balance of Payments manual (BPM). The data first produced under the new post-1998 systems covered a period from 1987 to 1997 and although the initial intention was to back-fill the historical data prior to 1986, resources did not permit doing this for more than a handful of series. This exercise, therefore, is a step towards completing that objective by initially reconstructing the data as they existed prior to 1998 so that a comprehensive linking process can be attempted. As far as possible, the time series start at 1948 annually. The range of quarterly series for the balance of payments is not as extensive and typically starts later.

• Fifty Years of UK Balance of Payments - Pink Book data 1948-1997

A sibling dataset covers the national accounts data that appeared in the Blue Book at the same point in time and is available in the National Accounts section.

World Trade data

World trade data for 1800-1938 has recently been compiled by Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-Junguito and is available at

• World Trade Historical Database 1800-1938

Historical world trade data compiled by the United Nations for 1900-1965 can be found here

• International Trade Statistics 1900-1960.

The data tables can be easily copied and pasted into a spreadsheet from the pdf. Both datasets can be combined with modern data on world trade from the IMF and WTO.

UK overseas investment

The Bank of England published estimates of the UK's overseas investments for the period 1938-1963 before these were superseded by the more comprehensive estimates of overseas assets and liabilities produced in the CSO's Pink Book from 1964 onwards. The Pink Books are available in the Articles and Periodicals sections below.

• UK Overseas Investments 1938-1958 (complete set) (59MB)
• UK Overseas Investments - 1938-1948
• UK Overseas Investments - 1948-1949
• UK Overseas Investments - 1949-1950
• UK Overseas Investments - 1950-1951
• UK Overseas Investments - 1952
• UK Overseas Investments - 1954
• UK Overseas Investments - 1953
• UK Overseas Investments - 1955
• UK Overseas Investments - 1956
• UK Overseas Investments - 1957
• UK Overseas Investments - 1958
• UK overseas portfolio investments 1959 to 1961 (QB 1962 Q2) pp.103-105
• United Kingdom overseas portfolio investments, 1958 to 1960 (QB 1961 Q2) pp.30-32
• United Kingdom overseas portfolio investments 1961-63 (QB 1964 Q2) pp.118-120

Useful methodological articles

• GSS Methodology Series No. 10 - Statistics on Trade in Goods
• GSS Methodology Series No. 36 - Statistics on Trade in Goods
• U.K. overseas portfolio investments (QB 1965 Q2) p.156

The following titles are available to select in the dropdown menus of this section.

• Annual Statement of Trade in the United Kingdom Vol.1 (selected years)
• Monthly Review of External Trade Statisitcs (MRETS) 2001-2011
• Report on Overseas Trade from 1948-1971
• Trade and Navigation Accounts (coming soon)
• UK Balance of Payments (Pink Book) from 1946
• UK Quarterly Economic Accounts from 1992
• UK Trade in Goods and Services (coming soon)

Note many of the publications in the Headline Macro Data section also contain substantial amounts of UK trade data going back to the C19th. An Excel file for Pink Book 1997 based on the historical reconstruction of official data by Anne Harrison discussed in the Datasets section is also available in the dropdown list alongside the pdf file for that year.

Please select a publication title and year from the boxes below to narrow down the list. Alternatively type in a general search term. The available excel and pdf files are shown in the table. If the publication you are looking for is not in this section please see the complete list of downloadable publications. 

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