Any finance or City types read this thing? I’m looking to get some financial statisitcs and can’t seem to find a way to get them without paying through the nose. I’ve got one possibility (Scott, that’s you) yet it might be worth an open appeal.
OK.
What do I want to do? Look at what would be the effect of the UK being outside the EU’s tariff barrier. From what I can see no one’s done this yet.
OK.
How am I going to do this?
Well, Customs collects data on UK exports to other EU countries. I can see it on their website. Collected by an 8 digit  product code.
I can also see on their site the entire tariff, sorted by the same 8 digit code.
Both in machine readable form.
OK. There’s 10,000 classifications but that’s OK, stick both into excel, play around a bit, a few macros and we should be able to build a model.
Make a few assumptions about the price elasticity of demand and we can start making noises about how much being outside the barrier will (or will not) mean to our exports.
So, I can hear the assembled voices asking….if the stuff’s there why don’t you just download it? ’Coz they want a thousand smackers for the subscription.
Soooo. Anyone working at one of these financial type jobs, City slickers, will find that their economics dept will already have a subscription, and thus the data can be downloaded at zero marginal (well, OK, a quid for the CD) cost.
So, anyone out there in that sort of situation?

One of the things that really stuns me about this situation is that you have to pay to find out what import duties are. The US code is available in .pdf for free.