1887

OECD Economics Department Working Papers

Working papers from the Economics Department of the OECD that cover the full range of the Department’s work including the economic situation, policy analysis and projections; fiscal policy, public expenditure and taxation; and structural issues including ageing, growth and productivity, migration, environment, human capital, housing, trade and investment, labour markets, regulatory reform, competition, health, and other issues.

The views expressed in these papers are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the OECD or of the governments of its member countries.

English, French

The trade impact of the UK’s exit from the EU Single Market

This paper quantifies the sectoral trade impact in the United Kingdom and in EU countries of the UK’s exit from the Single Market, using the OECD general-equilibrium METRO model. A comprehensive free-trade agreement could lead to a fall by about 6.1% of UK exports and 7.8% of UK imports in the medium term compared to a situation where the United Kingdom would stay in the Single Market. Cost would come essentially from rising technical barriers and sanitary and phytosanitory measures on goods and rising trade costs on services. Rules of origin and border transition costs would have a small effect. Output losses in the European Union (0.4-0.5%) are expected to be less pronounced, but would vary markedly across individual countries. Ireland would experience the largest losses. Losses would also vary across sectors. Accounting for the regulatory impact of ending free movement of people for EU nationals on services trade is expected to bring some additional costs to the services economy. Those losses could be partly compensated by growth-enhancing changes to UK regulations, but only to a limited extent.

English

Keywords: free-trade agreement, Brexit, general-equilibrium model
JEL: F15: International Economics / Trade / Economic Integration; F47: International Economics / Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance / Macroeconomic Aspects of International Trade and Finance: Forecasting and Simulation: Models and Applications; C68: Mathematical and Quantitative Methods / Mathematical Methods; Programming Models; Mathematical and Simulation Modeling / Computable General Equilibrium Models
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a Success
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error