NI Trade Performance and External Sales Activity

As a preliminary research exercise, we provide insights into the trade performance and external sales activity of businesses identified as belonging to the 10X priority sectors relative to other businesses. We also examine whether geography, Brexit and Covid-19 impacted business trading behaviour and economic performance over the period 2014–2020. We focus on four
research questions:
1. Is the data provided by NISRA (BESES and NIABI) usable for researching the
performance and trading behaviour of Northern Ireland businesses?
2. How has the relative performance and trading behaviour of business sectors in Northern Ireland changed over the period 2014–2020, with particular emphasis on the 10X priority clusters?
3. Are there regional differences in the relative performance and trajectory of business sectors in Northern Ireland over the period 2014–2020, with particular emphasis on the 10X priority clusters?
4. Is it possible to design a model for Northern Ireland trade distinct from the United Kingdom?
The report has the following parts:
• We discuss and summarise the BESES and NIABI datasets and provide feedback on the user experience of using these datasets.
• We summarise trade performance and external sales activity, with perspectives on variation by geography, sector and across time.
• We explore the determinants of business performance and exporting behaviour.
• We provide additional (separate) reports for Northern Ireland sub-regions.
• We discuss the possibility of modelling trade for Northern Ireland.
• We outline possible future research directions.
Some notable findings include the following:
• The percentage of businesses which sold only to the Northern Ireland market declined substantially during 2014–2019.
• In general, the external orientation of businesses increased during that period. This was more marked amongst those businesses identified as within the 10X clusters.
• The pattern of external markets at the NI sub-regional level displayed some notable contrasts. In relative terms, the percentage share going to the Republic of Ireland as compared to Great Britain was higher in, for example, Derry City and Strabane (i.e., closer to the Irish Border) than, say, for either Belfast or Causeway Coast and Glens.
• In general, although there were sectoral and NI sub-regional variations, sales per employment and gross value added (GVA) per employment (i.e., labour productivity indicators) were higher in the years after the Brexit decision (2016) than before. However, in most cases such variations were not statistically significant.

• Although certain infrastructural and agglomeration advantages (e.g., closeness to ports and airports, network effects and a larger pool of labour) might have been expected to favour businesses in Belfast compared to other sub-regions, in fact, the greatest (real terms) growth in GVA occurred in the Lisburn and Castlereagh and Fermanagh and Omagh and Mid Ulster areas.
• In general, during the period 2014–2020, the average size of businesses in our sample increased. (We cannot be sure if this represented a change in the underlying population of businesses or was a result of the sampling)