How much would a ‘White Paper Brexit’ cost the UK economy?
This blog article is the combination of a work that I did with my colleagues Amit Kara with some work that my other colleagues Rebecca Piggott and Arno Hantzsche did.It was first published in NIESR's blog and is reproduced here with permission. The UK government published a White Paper on 12th July outlining its preferences for a future relationship with the EU. In this blog we compare the proposals outlined in the White Paper against other EU free trade agreements (FTA) and also estimate the impact on the UK relative to our central forecast, published in August 2018, that assumes a soft Brexit. Our results suggest that the UK is looking for a trading relationship that is similar in scope to the arrangement between the EU and Switzerland. If that is indeed the case, we believe that the EU will insist that the UK make concessions on the freedom of movement of people and also ask for a budgetary contribution to EU programmes related to the single market. We estimate that the econo