The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects
Name
brexit02_technical_paper.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
1.11 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
1d0d311456a65309838e9f23e86f7733
Author(s)
Dhingra, Swati
Huang, Hanwei
Ottaviano, Gianmarco
Paulo Pessoa, João
Sampson, Thomas
Van Reenen, John Michael
Date Issued
October 2017
Journal
Economic Policy
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Citation
Dhingra, Swati et al. "The costs and benefits of leaving the EU: trade effects." Economic Policy 32, 92 (October 2017): 651-705 © 2017 CEPR, CESifo, Sciences Po
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This paper estimates the welfare effects of Brexit in the medium to long run, focusing on trade and fiscal transfers. We use a standard quantitative general equilibrium trade model with many countries and sectors and trade in intermediates. We simulate a range of counterfactuals reflecting alternative options for European Union (EU)–United Kingdom (UK) relations following Brexit. Welfare losses for the average UK household are 1.3% if the UK remains in the EU’s Single Market like Norway (a ‘soft Brexit’). Losses rise to 2.7% if the UK trades with the EU under World Trade Organization rules (a ‘hard Brexit’). A reduced-form approach that captures the dynamic effects of Brexit on productivity more than triples these losses and implies a decline in average income per capita of between 6.3% and 9.4%, partly via falls in foreign investment. The negative effects of Brexit are widely shared across the entire income distribution and are unlikely to be offset from new trade deals.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1093/epolic/eix015
