I'm not sure you realise what you're looking at. The figures quoted by the OP are the value of all imports added to the value of all exports. If you're looking at this from the perspective of working out which country has the most 'globalised' economy, then you could quite reasonably call the UK the 4th most 'globalised' economy.
However, if you want to see which countries are doing "well" in terms of global trade, then it is not the total volume of trade you need to be looking at, it is the
net balance of trade. (I.e. the value of everything we export minus the value of everything we import.)
Britain has an
enormous trade deficit with the rest of the world. (< Bad thing.) These figures from 2011 show the extent of the problem:
List of sovereign states by current account balance - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Note how Germany has a $220Bn trade
surplus, and the UK has a $160Bn trade
deficit. The reason we have a trade deficit is because the value of our exports doesn't come anywhere close to balancing out the amount we import; because the products we manufacture aren't very good and they're overpriced.
The reason you don't "see" the craze with Germany, is because you've never looked into the issue. Sure, German cars are excellent, but they're just the most visible symbol of German manufacturing. What you probably don't know is that almost 20% of the value of every iPhone in the world goes to Germany, because the valuable components in the iPhone are manufactured in Germany and used by Apple under licence. While the phone is assembled in China, the valuable components (e.g. camera/display/processor) which it is made of are produced in Japan (which produces almost 1/3 of the value of an iPhone) and Germany (which produces 17%), and used under license from companies like Siemens, Phillips and Zeiss. This doesn't just apply to iPhones, it applies to other smartphones as well, and tablets, and laptops, and PC's;
regardless of which brand name the final product is sold under.
Companies like Bosch, Miele, Siemens and Phillips manufacture a large proportion of the worlds TV's, washing machines, drying machines, shower units, ovens, microwaves; in fact almost anything you can think of. They absolutely trounce the UK in manufacturing output, because they took sensible decisions like subsidising industry directly, supporting industry indirectly (many of the biggest German manufacturers like Volkswagen are partly state owned), using the state to support industry (e.g. the German state railway buys German trains from Siemens) giving stability to their manufacturers while we privatised most of our industries 100% and let them go bankrupt because we wrongly believed that all manufacturing was dead due to competition from the developing world.
The German craze is because their young people don't have to look forward to a future stacking shelves or cold calling people for payment protection insurance because there are no meaningful jobs left for those without a Masters degree. Their wages are higher, their standard of living is higher. They have lower levels of poverty, and higher levels of productivity.
In essence, the German craze that you don't see is because they've succeeded in all the areas we've failed. ("Failed" is the maybe the wrong word, because to 'fail' you normally have to try in the first place; but you get my drift.)
Eoin
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