About L. Alan Winters

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So far L. Alan Winters has created 23 blog entries.

A few important steps forward: the UK-EU strategic partnership

The current UK Government is focused on delivering economic growth and positioning the UK as an important economic and diplomatic player internationally. The relationship with the EU is probably the most crucial bit in this jigsaw, and the deal struck on Monday, outlined in a “Common Understanding”, indicates the direction of travel: cautiously and selectively rebuilding closer relations with the EU along a number of dimensions, first and foremost on security and defence matters, but also including energy, environmental, and some economic aspects. We will discuss three particular areas that are related to trade in the ‘common understanding’: fisheries and trade in agri-food products, youth mobility, and cooperation on energy markets and carbon emissions, respectively.  We explain why the deal delivers in two out of three areas.  More could have been done, and with firmer commitments.  The document essentially represents a negotiating agenda with mostly aspirational language, whereby the two parties agree to “work towards” certain outcomes and everything has to be finally negotiated.  Yet every journey starts with a single step, and the one taken on Monday is a sensible step in the right direction. Fish and food: Significant departures from Brexit A core, perhaps the main, EU demand [...]

By , , , , |2025-05-21T18:45:18+01:0021 May 2025|Blog, International Trade, UK- EU|0 Comments
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Stroking a bear to get half a sandwich

The UK and the US announced the first bilateral post-Reciprocal Tariffs deal on 8 May, named the 'U.S.-UK Economic Prosperity Deal' (henceforth the US-UK EPD). The document published yesterday draws out the contours of this EPD, alongside some concrete initial proposals for reciprocal preferential market access for selected goods. Notwithstanding the negotiations starting immediately, this arrangement can be called off at any time, simply by the two parties giving each other written notice. Besides its symbolic and diplomatic relevance, what is the value of this emerging deal for the UK? This is not a Free Trade Agreement. At first glance, it looks like a quid-pro-quo “mini-deal” of limited economic relevance that the US strong-armed the UK into accepting under the threat of tariffs. The UK is getting some respite from Trump’s tariffs in the (important) car and the (strategic) steel and aluminium sectors, in exchange for lowering tariffs on some agricultural products such as ethanol and beef, the latter on a reciprocal basis. But a closer reading of the ‘General Terms document’ suggests that it is more than this, and a lot worse. First, as stated on page 1 of the text, the arrangement that the US and the UK [...]

By , , , , |2025-05-09T18:57:18+01:009 May 2025|Blog, International Trade|0 Comments
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Why discussion of Trade Policy matters in the General Election

30 May 2024 - Ingo Borchert is Deputy Director of the UKTPO, a Member of the Leadership Group of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and a Reader in Economics at the University of Sussex. Michael Gasiorek is Co-Director of the UKTPO, Co-Director of the CITP and Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. Emily Lydgate is Co-Director of the UKTPO and Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Sussex. L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the CITP and former Director of the UKTPO. A general election is underway, and the parties are making various promises and commitments to attract voters, and both the main parties – the Conservatives and Labour – are keen to persuade the country that they have a credible plan. Now it might just be that the authors of this piece are trade nerds, but one key aspect of economic policy has not yet been clearly articulated, or even mentioned – and that is international trade policy. In our view, this is a mistake. As a hugely successful open economy, international trade constitutes a significant share of economic activity, supports over 6 million jobs in the UK, spurs innovation, and enhances consumption choices. [...]

By , , , |2025-01-15T12:06:48+00:0030 May 2024|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|6 Comments
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Supporting UK prosperity through a renewed Board of Trade

22 May 2024 David Henig is Director of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE). He has written extensively on the development of UK Trade Policy post Brexit, in the context of developments in EU and global trade policy on which he also researches and writes. L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and former Director of the UKTPO. One of the most heralded claims for Brexit was taking back control of UK international trade policy. Four years later, this is not widely seen as having been a success. Trade growth has been disappointing, the UK has become less open, exporting is still heavily concentrated in the Southeast of England, and there is little trust in Government pronouncements on trade. And yet there is almost no coherent discussion of trade policy and no evident strategy guiding future policy objectives or the signature of new trade agreements. Part of the issue is that thinking about trade policy is trapped in the remnants of the Brexit debate and substantially seen in party political terms; it is consequently lacking any broadly accepted understanding. This is unsatisfactory and as part of [...]

By , |2025-01-15T12:19:10+00:0022 May 2024|UK- EU|0 Comments
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Do labour and environmental provisions in trade agreements lead to better social and environmental outcomes in practice?

13 December 2023 James Harrison is Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. Emily Lydgate is Professor in Environmental Law at the University of Sussex and Deputy Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO).  Ioannis Papadakis is a researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and a Research Fellow in Economics. Sunayana Sasmal currently serves as a Research Fellow in International Trade Law at the UKTPO. Mattia di Ubaldo is Fellow of the UKTPO and Research Fellow in Economics of European Trade Policies. L. Alan Winters is Founding Director of the UKTPO,  Co-Director of the CITP and Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. In answering this important question, different disciplinary approaches have emerged as have a range of different and sometimes contradictory findings. At the moment, scholars from the different disciplines are not talking to each other about the implications of this. The authors of this blog suggest it is vitally important that they begin to do so.   Trade agreements around the world increasingly include environmental and labour provisions. Their presence attests to policymakers’ recognition that trade agreements cannot simply focus on economic issues. They should also address environmental and social [...]

By , , , , |2025-01-15T12:35:09+00:0013 December 2023|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|3 Comments
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Is it really true that Brexit has had no harmful effects?

17 February 2023 L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy, Professor of Economics at University of Sussex Business School and Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory. Given the recent discussions about future UK-EU relations and the review of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) after two years, I have started reading the Brexit literature again.  A recent paper – ‘What impact is Brexit having on the UK economy?’ by Graham Gudgin, Julian Jessop and Harry Western (GJW) from October 2022 argues there is no hard evidence of harm and that studies that claim to find harm are biased and/or incompetent! In this blog, I consider a few of their points in four areas. […]

By |2025-01-29T15:40:49+00:0017 February 2023|Blog, International Trade, UK- EU|3 Comments
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Briefing Paper 59 – G7 LEADERS SHOULD DISCUSS INTERNATIONAL TRADE (SERIOUSLY)

International trade in a digital world is increasingly influenced by domestic regulation and is linked to non-trade areas such as health or climate change.  This makes it difficult for the WTO’s consensus- and trade-focused structure to make swift progress.  This Briefing Paper looks at how the G7 leadership across all four Trade Tracks could provide the necessary impetus for multilateral or open plurilateral solutions, in order to avert further fragmentation of the trading system. Read Briefing Paper 59: G7 LEADERS SHOULD DISCUSS INTERNATIONAL TRADE (SERIOUSLY)

By , , , |2024-11-20T13:05:13+00:002 June 2021|Briefing Papers|0 Comments
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Briefing Paper 54 – TAKING STOCK OF THE UK-EU TRADE AND COOPERATION AGREEMENT: GOVERNANCE, STATE SUBSIDIES AND THE LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the UK and the EU came into force on the 1st January 2021. This Briefing Paper considers the governance, subsidies and the level playing field provisions. The analysis reveals that much of the area lies outside the normal dispute settlement procedure and in some cases bespoke procedures replace or supplement it.  There are some innovative clauses concerning procedures to deal with imbalances arising from future labour and environmental policies, and the potential for review of the balance of the entire trade heading,  but these are quite unknown quantities and have the capacity to create perpetual wrangling and bad feeling between the UK and the EU. Read Briefing Paper 54: TAKING STOCK OF THE UK-EU TRADE AND COOPERATION AGREEMENT: GOVERNANCE, STATE SUBSIDIES AND THE LEVEL PLAYING FIELD 

By , , , |2024-11-20T13:06:58+00:003 January 2021|Briefing Papers|0 Comments
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Briefing Paper 51 – THE COSTS OF BREXIT

In this paper, the authors update their previous analysis of Brexit to reflect the presumed Free Trade Agreement (FTA). They assess the costs of Brexit with such an FTA and ask how much benefit the FTA will deliver relative to ‘No Deal’.  This paper improves on previous analyses by including more detailed modelling of the costs of doing trade and of the barriers to services trade that the exit from the Single Market will introduce.  Even with a deal, Brexit increases UK-EU trade costs, reduces trade between the two partners, and requires resources for form-filling, queuing, etc. The net effect is that the UK’s GDP will be 4.4% lower than in the absence of Brexit, compared with 5.5% lower if there had been no deal. Read Briefing Paper 51: The Costs of Brexit

By , , |2024-11-20T13:08:21+00:002 December 2020|Briefing Papers|0 Comments
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Briefing Paper 48 – THE “BEARABLE LIGHTNESS” OF BREXIT ON THE ACP COUNTRIES’ TRADE: GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS AND RULES OF ORIGIN

This Briefing Paper considers how Brexit will impinge on the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries currently governed by the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiated by the EU. The authors explore whether the new Brexit-induced frictions on UK-EU trade will reduce the demand for ACP inputs – such as Cocoa products – into the goods that the UK and EU trade with each other. They conclude that the economic effects of even a ‘No Deal’ Brexit on ACP countries’ trade will be tiny in aggregate, because ACP countries supply only small amounts of inputs into the products involved in UK-EU trade. Read Briefing Paper 48: THE “BEARABLE LIGHTNESS” OF BREXIT ON THE ACP COUNTRIES’ TRADE: GLOBAL VALUE CHAINS AND RULES OF ORIGIN

By , , , |2024-11-20T13:09:23+00:002 September 2020|Briefing Papers|0 Comments
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