Scotland’s International Goods Trade: Quarter 3 2022

This report contains trade in goods data from the latest release of HMRC's Regional Trade Statistics (RTS). This data is quarterly and covers up to the period ending September 2022. The data covers the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the first 21 months of trade following European Union (EU) Exit. These are the provisional estimates and may be revised in future.

HMRC have implemented two changes in the data sources and data collection methods for UK trade with the EU since 2021 which can be found in the RTS methodology note. These changes create breaks due to methodological changes in the time series from January 2021 for EU exports and for January 2022 for EU imports, so users should take care when making comparisons with quarters and years prior to 2021 for exports and prior to 2022 for imports.

In this report, goods exports in the first nine months of 2022 are compared with the first nine months of 2019. This was chosen as the comparison period, given that 2019 is judged to represent a more ‘normal’ year for trade data than the years 2020 or 2021, which were impacted by the pandemic. Analysis is shown using the first three quarters of 2022 as this also shows the picture using the most recent data available.

Data is presented in current prices, which means that it also includes the effects of inflation. Caution should therefore be applied when interpreting increasing trends as these could be strongly influenced by inflation.

A portion of these statistics are presented without oil and gas (by excluding Standard Industrial Trade Classification (SITC) section 3 – Mineral fuels) due to high volatility in the data. Additionally, for Scotland, oil and gas account for a large proportion of exports.

If you have any comments or feedback, please email exports.statistics@gov.scot.