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Clothing Imports

Map No. 84

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Despite the vast range of clothing styles throughout the world, there is a large international trade in clothes. These clothes arrive, more often than not, in the United States, Western Europe and Japan.

Most clothes are made in territories where employers can pay low labour costs, which partially maintains low prices for the populations of importing territories.

Spending per person on imports (net US$) shows that some Western European territories have high import rates. There are particularly low net imports per person to some territories in Northern and Southeastern Africa.

"... we are trying to balance a number of interests here because obviously people want less expensive goods ..." Tony Blair, 2005

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net imports of clothes (in US$) that are received there. Net imports are imports minus exports. When exports are larger than imports the territory is not shown.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page