John Springford published a policy brief that provides doppelgänger estimates for the impact of Brexit – and the pandemic – on Britain’s GDP, on gross fixed capital formation (GFCF, a broad measure of investment across the economy), on services trade and on goods trade, for the last quarter of 2021
Following statement he provided at the beginning of the paper:
In May 2020, the well-connected journalist James Forsyth wrote in The Spectator that the British government was comfortable about Britain leaving the EU with no deal. That was because advisors thought that “coronavirus has collapsed world trade and travel, dwarfing any changes Brexit might bring.” As my series on the impact of Brexit on goods trade has shown, this turned out to be wrong: leaving the single market and customs union has reduced UK goods trade by around 15 per cent.1 Yet the government was right about one thing: the pandemic has made it hard to isolate the impact of Brexit on other economic indicators, like GDP, services trade or investment. Now that many advanced economies have recovered and are close to – or above – their pre-pandemic level of output, we can compare Britain’s economic performance to its peers. The results are troubling