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Recent Trends in Dividends Payments and Share Buy-Backs
Presents detailed dividends data intended to enable users to better understand trends in the series.
This article is a follow up to two previous articles, which explained in detail the new methodology for calculating dividends and the reasons for the changes in methodology. This article is intended to present more detailed dividends data to enable users to better understand trends in the series.
Dividends and share buy-backs form an important part of the UK National Accounts. In 1999 some £100 billion (equivalent to 11 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) was paid as dividends by UK companies; the proportion was similar for the first three quarters of 2000.
During 1999, dividends worth £21bn (21 per cent of the total) were paid by UK companies to foreign parents. During the first three quarters of 2000, however, this proportion had risen to 34 per cent (that is £25bn paid abroad out of a total of £73bn). These dividends are defined in the National Accounts as "remitted profits", a much wider category of payments than that normally understood as dividends.
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