Hard Brexit, soft Border. Some trade implications of the intra-Irish border options.

7 December 2017 Dr Emily Lydgate is a lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex and a fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory. How can the UK uphold its commitment to leaving the EU Single Market and Customs Union while also preserving the invisible intra-Irish border? Leaving aside crucial questions of political feasibility, this post looks at some of the options and their trade and border implications. Notably, there are limits to ‘flexible and creative’ solutions that involve turning a blind eye to customs and regulatory checks solely on the intra-Irish border: trade rules leave little room for such ad hoc approaches. […]

By |2025-09-05T11:54:46+01:007 December 2017|UK- EU|2 Comments

Will Brexit Raise the Cost of Living?

2 November 2017 Ilona Serwicka is Research Fellow in the Economics of Brexit at the UKTPO. As the United Kingdom is preparing to leave the European Union, Government policy is to seek a deep and comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU. But Brexit talks have not moved onto the trade issues yet and even if the future trade relationship is taken up in December, this gives little time and offers no guarantee that an agreement will be reached and ratified before 29 March 2019, the Brexit date. The Government has recently recognised the possibility that talks might break down and started to outline a ‘no deal’ vision of the UK-EU trade. Our analysis reveals that unemployed households, those with children, and pensioners will all fare off worse than average in the case of a ‘no deal’. A new paper, Will Brexit Raise the Cost of Living? by Stephen Clarke, Ilona Serwicka and L. Alan Winters, and published by the National Institute Economic Review, looks at the impact that imposing Most Favoured Nation (MFN) tariffs on UK imports from the EU would have on the price of goods sold in the UK and the average cost of living. […]

By |2017-11-02T16:53:35+00:002 November 2017|UK- EU|3 Comments

No deal’ Brexit tariffs could mean millions of households facing price rises of over £500 a year

17 October 2017 Lower-income households would be disproportionately affected should the UK revert to WTO tariffs Exiting the EU without a trade deal and reverting to WTO ‘most-favoured nation’ (MFN) tariffs with the EU would lead to significant price rises across a range of goods, with low-income households facing the biggest cost pressures. This is according to a new joint-report published by the Resolution Foundation and the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex. […]

By |2017-10-17T08:11:04+01:0017 October 2017|UK- EU|2 Comments
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