No sign UK Government cares one whit on Brexit woe
The Centre for European Reform think-tank estimated on Monday that, in October, UK goods trade was 15.7 per cent, or £12.6 billion, lower than it would have been if the country had stayed in the European single market and customs union.
The think-tank, which is focused on making the European Union work better and strengthening the bloc’s role in the world, bases its estimates in this context on a sophisticated model using a “doppelgänger UK”. This is a group of countries whose trade and other economic data closely matched that of the UK between the 2016 Brexit referendum and December 2019.
...And what the Centre for European Reform’s analysis does, by examining the trading performance of the “doppelgänger UK”, is strip out the impact of the pandemic to shine a light on what the UK’s hard Brexit has done to trade.
...The Centre for European Reform notes: “The doppelgänger is a subset of countries selected from a larger group of 22 advanced economies by an algorithm. The algorithm finds the countries that, when combined, create a doppelgänger UK that has the smallest possible deviation from the real UK data until December 2019, before the pandemic struck. The data includes goods trade, GDP growth, population, inflation, industrial production as a share of output, as well as some other measures.”