House of Commons International Trade Committee - UK-US Trade Relations Second Report of Session 2017–19

Samuel Lowe, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform told us that “the guilty secret” of trade is that FTAs “do not deliver much aggregate growth”. According to Mr Lowe, “[a]nything over 1 per cent is massive in terms of long-run growth, and most trade agreements are little more than rounding errors in terms of your long-run impact”.

...Samuel Lowe, for example, told us that due to the “difference in the regulatory regimes of the EU and the US, when we remove barriers with the US, in some areas we will by necessity have to put them up with the EU” [or these could be put up by the EU]. He indicated these barriers could be “quite hefty barriers for UK exporters to the EU”.

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