Thread by @Usherwood

Those of you who get the government alerts on Brexit will recall the huge pile of notifications this week on trade post-Brexit.

Maybe you read, maybe you didn't, but I'm interested in their coverage

1/

I had a stab at this yesterday, but now I've been a bit more systematic

https://twitter.com/Usherwood/status/1121806436344975361

2/

That meant I did a proper search for these notices and picked up the East Asian notices that appeared earlier in the week.

This fills the biggest whole in the map of coverage

3/

But there's still a lot of the world not covered by the notices out to date, so I've tried to map that across to the pattern of UK trade.

Step in the @ONS dataset on this: ons.gov.uk/businessindust… (this is the source for all the following)

4/

By this source, the notices cover only 104 of 237 territories (so 43.9%), hence all the grey on the map

Not so good, right?

5/

Well no, not by that measure, but then look at how much of the UK's trade is covered

Most of it

6/

If we look at where isn't covered (yet), then the picture is a bit clearer still

7/

Norway and Switzerland are the two biggies here: they make up 52% of the exports and 68% of the imports not covered by notices

8/

Given their size and location, there will have to be notices issued soon.

Likewise, the absence of a notice for Malta (the only EU27 state not to have one) is an anomaly

9/

If this all looks pretty minor stuff, do note that at present the territories without notices are equivalent to being the UK 3rd-largest export destination and 4th-largest import source, so it's not insignificant for traders needing official guidance

10/

We might also wonder that these notices only appear now, nearly two months after the original date for the UK's withdrawal from the EU

11/

In sum: a pretty good effort to cover the world, but not without its problems

/end