Evan Davis ‘Made in Britain’ - and a new trade data tool to play with

The first episode of a 3-part series, Made in Britain, was shown on BBC 2 last night, and was a really useful hour for economics (or business) students. It examined how and why Britain has lost thousands of manufacturing jobs over the last two or three decades in the low-value part of the sector, with some film of outsourcing shot in China as well as plenty of archive material from this country, but argued that the move to high-end, low scale manufacturing has become Britain’s area of comparative advantage in industrial manufacturing. This included Evan being taken for a test drive in the new McLaren sports car, which was clearly an amazing experience - watch the clip to see his reaction! And this surely emphasises the Economic Importance of Manufacturing to the UK economy - see below! Sadly this episode is not to be broadcast again, but is available on i-player for another 22 days and is thoroughly worth watching. I will certainly be setting the recording machine for the next two programmes, on Mondays at 9.00 on BBC2 - episode 2 is to focus on how innovation can help keep Britain ahead in the global economy.

The programme is an Open University broadcast. In exploring the links to the OU’s online toolkit, I found their new toy, called Visible Trade, which gives 20 years’ worth of UK export and import data and the chance to manipulate it to explore patterns of trade between the UK and the rest of the world as a whole, or selected geographical areas - really useful for studying the International Economy. There is also a set of instructions for getting started in using it - linked here.