India IT services exports

Between 2015 and 2024, India's IT services exports grew from approximately $108 billion to over $200 billion, while the average price of a pint of lager in the UK climbed steadily from around £3.30 to £4.70, maintaining an r of 0.9676. The causal chain, if one exists, involves Bangalore, Bengaluru, a pub in Stoke-on-Trent, and some form of economic fluid dynamics that has not yet been modelled. One reading: as Indian IT exports displaced UK service sector jobs, British workers consoled themselves with increasingly expensive pints. This explanation is wrong but has the advantage of being the most emotionally satisfying thing in this dataset.

Both metrics are upward-trending over a short 8-year window driven by entirely separate forces. India's IT services exports grew due to sustained global demand for software development, digital transformation spending, and India's competitive labour cost advantage, with NASSCOM reporting consistent double-digit export growth across this period. UK pint prices rose due to a combination of post-Brexit supply chain disruptions, energy cost increases, minimum wage rises, and VAT fluctuations that drove hospitality sector inflation. Both series are being pushed upward by their respective economies' structural conditions, and their correlation is an artifact of fitting two upward trends over a short window.

Short time windows with monotonic trends are correlation incubators — eight data points and two things that both generally increased will almost always produce an alarming r-value. The proper response to n=8 and r=0.97 is not excitement but suspicion.