“Rules of Origin” are a peripheral, obscure low-ranking technical matter, not an issue in the real world, barely on the radar of most exporting firms. Rules of origin only apply to trade in goods. Trade in services, income & transfers is free of customs duties and therefore of rules of origin. Rules of origin are sets of bureaucratic [...]
The absolute clarity of the legal/constitutional position, combined with the UK’s status as the remaining EU’s biggest single customer worldwide, with which the EU enjoys its biggest trade surplus anywhere, mean that, post-withdrawal, the remaining EU and the UK will ensure that trade between them will continue to be free of customs duties (tariffs) and non-tariff-barriers. The EU [...]
The overall real average rate of duty on imports of goods from outside the UK shrank by 26% between 2002 & 2011. The average rate of duty on imports of industrial goods, and on imports of agricultural & fish products, shrank between 2002 & 2010. · Seventy-five per cent by value of all UK imports of goods [...]
Cumulatively, over the last six years, the UK trade surplus with the world outside the EU was £ 21 bn. Over the same period, the UK deficit on trade with EU-26 was £190bn. The UK traded in deficit with nineteen of its twenty-six EU partners in 2011. Between 2008, when recession took hold, & 2011, UK exports [...]
The Eurozone is a single currency area which may be moving towards full political & economic union. Considered as a single trading bloc, more than two-thirds of its external trade with the world is with non-EU countries The Eurozone’s biggest single customer worldwide, both for All Trade (Goods, Services, Income, Transfers) and for Trade in Goods only, is [...]
