Development of UK exports is becoming increasingly important following the Brexit vote. Encouragingly UK has continued to grow exports to both our EU partners and to the rest of the world.

The 2018 Pink Book, published on 31 July, shows a year-on-year narrowing of the UK current account deficit from 5.2 per cent to 3.9 per cent of GDP, the lowest since 2012, and exports increasing across both goods and services.

However it is notable that in spite of a slowdown of growth of trade deficit in goods, this improvement was principally down to continuing strong growth of surpluses generated by services, and within them financial services which account for a major part of the service surplus.

This Insight report goes into detail about the current UK trade in goods, the impact on UK SMEs and the importance of the financial services sector to the UK's exports. It highlights the positive effect of the UK's trade growth but also looks into the challenges faced by the uncertainty over the final Brexit agreement. Click here to see the report in full.