Cross Border Supply Chain Report
Date published:
The Department for the Economy (DfE) has now published a range of material in relation to movements across the NI-ROI border. This shows that cross border travel is extensive with some 110 million movements of people across the border per annum, for all sorts of everyday purposes while previous publications have also shown the likely family linkages across the border.
For commerce and industry, that previous work has also demonstrated the extent of trade in goods and services by businesses across the border. There are a significant number of our small businesses engaged in cross border trade and much of this has the characteristics of local trade that just happens to occur across an international boundary.
This latest publication has added further to our understanding of those cross border commercial and industrial linkages, and to what extent those are integrated. It demonstrates that much of our cross border trade is in intermediate goods rather than final goods and that much of our cross border trade is integrated within Cross Border Supply Chains. It also shows that those interactions can actually be very frequent for relatively modest individual amounts, again reinforcing that much of our trade is more characteristic of local rather than international trade, involving small companies, facilitated by proximity and the land connection. Our trade with ROI is important in its totality, it is important for many small firms and it is important for existing supply chains. While it may technically be international trade it actually looks much more like local trade in local markets.