Our health services still have a long way to go, but we discover some of the best selling pills on the planet. And boy do we know about how to do home hairdressing, facials and leg waxing.Final salary hopeOne swallow does not a summer make, yet the news that EDF Energy is launching a new final salary pension scheme open to all 11,000 of its staff in the UK is a welcome break from the seemingly endless flow of announcements on the closure of defined benefit pension arrangements. Possibly it is, but only if Britons can continue to find innovative ways of generating wealth in other departments. We may not be at the forefront of consumer electronics, but we are cutting edge on video and PC games software. This phenomenon has in turn been fed by the growth of high earning but time poor, dual income households.

The biggest is micro-services, from hairdressing to gardening and pet-sitting, not forgetting “white van man”, hurtling around the country with his home deliveries, feng shui expertise, or bundles of drain unblockers. None the less, to believe that trade deficits of the size now being run by Britain and the US can be sustained indefinitely turns traditional economics on its head. Is it really possible for economies to survive and prosper in the modern, globalised world without making things that outsiders want to buy?According to Will Hutton, chief executive of the Work Foundation, points out that as British manufacturing has continued to decline, growth in employment is coming largely from four areas of the service industries. Furthermore, Britain is bound to be sucking in more imports from Europe than it can export back given that its growth rate is more than twice as high.On a number of different levels, then, the figures are not as alarming as they first appear. That number is more than halved by invisibles – direct foreign investment into Britain, income on overseas investments, tourism, and wholesale financial services. Perhaps, unfortunately, most of these services are not internationally traded, despite the fact that they create value and employment domestically.

So although, increasingly, we buy our goods from overseas, we are not able to match them with an equal and opposite quantity of exports.For last year as a whole, the deficit in goods was a mighty £46bn, or nearly 5 per cent of gross domestic product. Sterling barely batted an eyelid in response.Why not? The answer lies with the transformation Britain has achieved from a manufacturing economy to one which today is nearly all service based. Long gone are the days when numbers of the magnitude announced yesterday would prompt a run on the pound. Investors will take some convincing that the latest upturn in demand is any more than history repeating itself.Benign deficitDoes it matter that Britain’s trade deficit with Europe was at its highest ever for goods in September? Factor in services, and there was a record trade deficit with the rest of the world as well. No doubt the sponsors have done their homework and already know the rights can be sold.