A little knowledge

One of my standard stories in the pub is that this country, that is to say the UK, consumes about 10% more stuff than it produces, thus accounting for our dire balance of payments.

Another way of looking at this is that we are selling ourselves off to foreigners to finance current expenditure. Hence all the empty towers in Vauxhall owned by said foreigners.

Yet another thing to do is to compare dividend flows into the country with dividend flows out of the country. For a long time we were able to live off past glories, with the dividends we got from investments overseas far exceeding the dividends they got from investments here. With my story being that examination of that famous government publication called the pink book would reveal the first line going steadily downhill and the second going steadily uphill, with the two of them having crossed over some years ago.

So this morning, I was moved to try and check this story, against the next time that I got it out. To find that our national statistics office (reference 1) is very generous with its statistics, but not so generous with explanations. A source for people that know what they are doing, rather than the simply curious.

With the result that the best I could do was an Excel workbook giving me the various tables from chapter 8 of the 2016 pink book. Table 8.1 looked the most promising, with the bottom line being something called the 'Net International Investment Position', aka HBQB. Just the raw data mind, more or less nothing in the way of explanation, but hopefully all the stuff over there that we own less all the stuff over here that they own. Assets less liabilities. A rather volatile series, but one which was generally negative, agreeing after a fashion with the story with which I started.

I then feed HBQB back into the search box at the top of reference 1 to be given the graph snipped above, a graph which lurches up to a strongly positive position in the course of 2016. I wonder if this is the effect of the devaluation of the pound following the brexit vote. But beyond thinking that it is perhaps time to refurbish my story, I decide to call a halt at this point.

PS: and why does the series start around zero, back in 1977? What is going on here? What am I missing?

Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.