You asked
I'm writing to request some information about the UK's Trade Volumes with South Korea
In particular I'd like to know what the total volume of Trade between the United Kingdom, and South Korea was between the period 1 January 1964 to 31 December 2014. If data to cover this entire period is not available, then data to cover the earliest to the latest dates in this period would suffice. In particular, I'm interested in finding:-
Total value of Imports from South Korea to the UK (in £) at the end of each year in this period (So at the end of 1964, 1965, 1966...and so on all the way to 2014)
Total value of Exports from the UK to South Korea (in £) at the end of each year in this period.
The top 5 import products/ product catgories which the UK imports from South Korea (to cater for changes, this can be broken down into decades - so from 64 -74 which were the top 5 imports; from 74 -84; 84 - 94 and so on...)
The top 5 exports products/ product categories from the UK to South Korea (broken into decades as above)
We said
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) publishes estimates for UK trade in goods & services, UK trade in goods and UK trade in services with South Korea as part of tables 9.3, 9.4 & 9.5 respectively in the Balance of Payments Pink Book
Additional information on the types of services are available for 2012 and 2013 in tables 9.10 and 9.11 and a further time series (2007 to 2011) for UK exports to South Korea by type of service is available on the ONS website
For the main goods commodities traded with South Korea, the information is published on Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) trade statistics website www.uktradeinfo.com from 1996.
To find the information on the website select the heading ‘Statistics’ followed by the option to ‘Build Your Own Data Tables’. After you have selected this option there will be a link on the left hand side of the page for ‘Data by Commodity Code’, which takes you to the page where you can build the data table.
It is possible to select flow type (imports, exports, arrivals and dispatches) and the years of interest. In addition you can expand the geographical regions to view trade data with individual countries. This information can be exported as an Excel, PDF or CSV file.
When you have identified the trading partners of interest, you can use the drop down menu ‘EU Indicator’ on the data table page to select those countries. The level of detail can be increased further to show the type of goods that have been traded between the UK and other countries.
There is help available for building and using the online data tables
Data for UK trade in goods by commodity from 1993 is available on the UN Comtrade database.
Neither the ONS or HMRC are able to supply these particular trade figures as far back as 1964. We are unsure if any other department is able to supply this data but it may be worth contacting the British Library to see if they are able to assist with historic data.