Scotland's International Goods Trade: Quarter 3 2023

HMRC RTS relate to international trade in goods only, including oil and gas. The figures exclude trade in services and the movement of goods within the UK. The figures in this release are provisional at this stage and are subject to revision in future releases.

These figures are based on HMRC’s own methodology, which is mostly based on allocating trade to a region or country in the UK based on the location of the company trading. If the company has multiple sites, trade is allocated based on the proportion of employees in that region. Further details on their methodology can be found on the Regional Trade in Goods Statistics methodology pages.

Due to the changes in the way this data is collected since the end of the EU Transition Period, additional low value trade that was previously allocated to countries and regions may now be reported under the ‘Unallocated-unknown’ category. This has led to a likely reduction in the UK to EU export values, and the export values for Scotland (and other regions) from January 2021 onwards. More detailed notes on these effects can be found in the full HMRC RTS publication.

Furthermore, from January 2022, HMRC implemented a change in their data collection methods affecting trade goods data on imports from the EU to Great Britain. This creates a break in the time series, and so caution should be exercised when making comparisons with quarters and years prior to 2022.

The latest data is provisional and data are not finalised until the following June’s month of account; data in this provisional period may be revised in future releases to account for late returns. The latest data will be available on the UK Trade Info website.

The Scottish Government produces estimates of the value of Scotland’s exports in the Export Statistics Scotland 2021 (ESS 2021) publication, which includes exports of goods and services. The value of Scotland’s goods exports from HMRC RTS is much higher than the ESS estimate of the value of international manufacturing exports, largely because HMRC RTS include exports of oil and gas, whereas ESS estimates do not. When oil and gas is excluded from the RTS values, the estimates are much more similar. More information can be found in the Export Statistics Scotland methodology note.