The rise in exports from Northern Ireland to the Republic of Ireland is not as big as claimed

(The article can be read here: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/imports-from-ni-to-republic-up-77-since-uk-s-eu-exit-1.4648699).

It now seems that this claim may have been based on rather dodgy statistics.

The newspaper article quoted data provided by the Irish Republic’s Central Statistics Office (CSO). Since then we have got the August figures which claim to show a 61% increase in exports of goods from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic this year as compared with the period January to August 2020

(https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/er/gei/goodsexportsandimportsaugust2021/ - Table 4)

The 2021 figure was said to be 2.5 billion euros (roughly £2.1 billion). If we add 50% to that figure to extrapolate from eight months to a full year, we end up with slightly over £3 billion.

Now the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) also produces estimates of such trade based on figures supplied by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). It says that in 2020, exports of goods from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic were valued at £3.1 billion. An earlier estimate, based on survey data in 2016, valued such trade at £3.4 billion

(https://www.nisra.gov.uk/sites/nisra.gov.uk/files/publications/Overview-of-NI-Trade-Factsheet-August-2021.pdf)

What this means is that the levels of trade this year, represented by the Irish Times and the CSO as a bumper increase, are in fact precisely at the levels which NISRA and HMRC would lead us to expect from the previous year’s data. What could have gone wrong in encouraging the CSO to make claims of a big increase?

The clue may be in an obscure document published by the CSO on 15 July 2021, headed Information Note on Revision to Trade with Northern Ireland (https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/in/gei/informationnoteonrevisiontotradewithnorthernireland/).

It explains that “From 1st January 2021, all trade in goods with Great Britain (excluding Northern Ireland) must be reported to Revenue’s Customs declaration systems. Prior to this, data on trade with Great Britain were collected via a combination of the Intrastat survey and VAT returns.” The 2020 and 2021 figures were compiled on a quite different basis.

The document goes on to admit that the CSO had to query some of the big increases in trade with Northern Ireland reported in 2021. Some of these it believed to be genuine but “in some cases, traders have reported that they had previously been incorrectly reporting their trading partner as Great Britain, when in fact the partner should have been a trader in Northern Ireland.

Where errors in historical data have been identified, the data has been revised by the CSO for a period of two years (2019-2020) to allow more accurate comparisons of Ireland’s trade with Northern Ireland before and after Brexit.”

(https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/in/gei/informationnoteonrevisiontotradewithnorthernireland/)

To correct this error, the CSO revised the value of 2020 exports from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic upwards, and the GB figures were reduced by a corresponding amount

(https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/in/gei/informationnoteonrevisiontotradewithnorthernireland/ — Table 1).

Given what we know from the NISRA-HMRC data, it does seem likely the CSO did not make a big enough correction to their figures. The effect of this would be to make the 2020 Northern Ireland figure unreasonably low, thus creating the impression that a big increase had taken place in 2021.

Because we now know that 2021 exports from Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic are precisely where last year’s NISRA-HMRC figures would expect them to be, the claims of a big increase do not seem to be well founded.

• Dr Kingsley is a retired computing academic

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