Research Report

If Germany is good at making cars and Japan at micro electronics, what does Britain excel at economically? The answer is ‘knowledge services’.  Trading in Ideas and Knowledge argues that knowledge services — in essence selling specialised brainpower - is the one category of economic activity in which the UK appears to be leading the rest of the world. Analysing official trade figures (from the government’s ‘Pink Book’), the paper finds that in 2005, the UK exported about £75 billion worth of knowledge services — up from £28 billion in 1995, a rise of 170 per cent — and now worth some 6.3 per cent of GDP.