. .

United Kingdom

UK's Economy

The UK, a leading trading power and financial center, is one of the trillion dollar economies of Western Europe. Over the past two decades, the government has greatly reduced public ownership and contained the growth of social welfare programs. Agriculture is intensive, highly mechanized, and efficient by European standards, producing about 60 percent of food needs with less than two percent of the labor force. The UK has large coal, natural gas, and oil resources, but its oil and natural gas reserves are declining and the UK became a net importer of energy in 2005; energy industries now contribute about four percent to GDP. Services, particularly banking, insurance, and business services, account by far for the largest proportion of GDP, while industry continues to decline in importance. Since emerging from a recession in 1992, Britain's economy enjoyed the longest period of expansion on record during which time growth outpaced most of Western Europe. The global economic slowdown, tight credit, and falling house prices, however, pushed Britain back into recession in the latter half of 2008 and prompted the Brown government to implement a number of new measures to stimulate the economy and stabilize the financial markets; these include part-nationalizing the banking system, cutting taxes, suspending public sector borrowing rules, and bringing forward public spending on capital projects.

2009 Exports from California to the UK

                                                                          Source: export.gov

UK's companies in California

  • In 1999, California firms owned by investors from the United Kingdom were the second largest foreign employers in California, with 93,000 workers or 14.6 percent of all California workers in foreign firms. Of these, 39,200 (42 percent) were manufacturing workers, a higher proportion than that of any other investing country.
  • UK firms are most active in manufacturing and in the information industries, each of which is responsible for more than one-quarter of all UK investment.
  • The United Kingdom's direct investment position in the United States grew a great deal between 1999 and 2001, from $154 billion to almost $218 billion. If these trends held for California, employment with UK affiliates might have topped 130,000 workers in 2001.
  • UK-owned California businesses would remain the second largest foreign employers, only behind Japanese-owned firms.
  • The UK is the fifth most popular destination for California exports. Computer and electronic products are the primary export industry, accounting for more than half of the total. The fastest growing export sectors are petroleum and coal products, paper, furniture and fixtures, and beverage and tobacco products. All of these have more than doubled since 1997.