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The Centre for European Reform says Brexit may have reduced UK goods trade by around 7% in the second quarter of 2022.

John Springford, at the Centre for European Reform, who tracks the impact of Brexit on the economy, calculates that tax revenues for the year to the end of June 2022 were £40 billion lower — this as Britain is hit by a wave of public worker strikes, with the government maintaining it does not have enough cash to meet their demands.

John Springford of the CER, tries to isolate the effect of Brexit by constructing a phantom country that tracked Britain’s performance before 2016’s referendum result. By using an algorithm to pick from a set of 22 countries rather than just selecting, say, a few economies of a similar size, he builds a plausible description of Britain’s path had it not voted to leave the eu (see chart 1). He estimates that by the second quarter of 2022, Brexit had hit gdp by as much as 6% relative to this counterfactual. Using the same method, he reckons that Brexit dragged down investment by 11%.

The Centre for Economic Performance reckons that including that "dynamic" effect of Brexit could increase its impact on potential output to a hit of between between 6.3% and 9.5%, and the Centre for European Reform suggests the impact may have been a shortfall by up to 11% of the output that might have been expected.

In December, the Centre for European Reform (CER) found that Brexit cost the UK a staggering £33bn in lost trade, investment and growth. The CER also estimated the tax loss from Brexit at around £40bn. The research – first shared with The Independent – showed that by June of this year Britain’s economy was 5.5 per cent smaller than it would have been if the country had remained in the EU.

“Everyone is talking about energy costs and comparing energy bills and that brings people together,” says Elisabetta Cornago, senior research fellow in energy at the Centre for European Reform. “Citizens want to see businesses, shops, and public entities save energy just as they are doing at home. Reducing very visible energy consumption like public lighting and shop signs, those things individually probably don’t make a big difference but it is about trying to put together a lot of relatively small consumption cuts and the visible ones can be highly motivating.”

“Ukraine has opened the EU’s eyes to the fact that there are a lot of big boys in the world and they have to play at the same level,” says Camino Mortera-Martinez, head of the Brussels office at the Centre for European Reform. “It has given the EU confidence – and brought it together more than anything else. And it is the first time that the EU has found a crisis that fits it well.”

Dans un article publié le 21 décembre, le Centre for European Reform (CER) estimait qu’au 2e trimestre 2022, le PIB britannique était inférieur de 5,5 % à ce qu’il aurait été si le pays était resté dans l’UE.