Brexit

What leaving the EU actually did to British trade — measured, not argued.

Britain left the EU’s single market in January 2021. This body of work tracks what actually happened to UK trade and firm performance in the years since — using firm-level and product-level data rather than the pre-referendum forecasts that dominated the public debate.

Services exports from the UK to Ireland fell sharply relative to a synthetic control once the Trade and Cooperation Agreement took effect — one of the clearest firm-level signals yet that Brexit’s costs have fallen disproportionately on services, not just goods.

Work

From pace-setter to laggard: Brexit and the British car industry

brexit
firms
car-industry
tca

In the years before the referendum, Britain’s car industry grew roughly eight times faster than Germany’s. Uncertainty slowed it, the Trade and Cooperation Agreement broke it away, and the next round of European trade rules may decide whether it has a future at all.

After SPS: the EU trade barrier that needs fixing next

brexit
firms

Five years of UK-EU trade data show a 53.8% decline in export product varieties and a 16.5% fall in export values — deeply integrated sectors survived Brexit, but the logic of maintaining them is eroding.

What steel tariffs reveal about the cost of going it alone

brexit
trade-wars
firms

New modelling with Jun Du finds UK steel tariffs cut imports 20% and raised consumer prices 27%, hitting downstream steel-users far harder than primary steelmakers — coordinating with the EU would pay off.

Beyond Tinkering: Is a “Swiss-Style” Reset Next for UK–EU Trade?

brexit

Piecemeal fixes haven’t reversed the post-Brexit decline in UK-EU trade — a comprehensive ‘Swiss-style’ regulatory framework might.

The UK Trade Report for September 2025

brexit

A Douglas Adams-inspired tour of UK trade in September 2025: a precious-metals boom, resilient aerospace and defence exports, a struggling car industry, and no seat at the AI hardware table.

Tariff Turbulence: How Trump’s Threats Are Rocking the UK Trade Deal

brexit
trade-wars

Tariff threats are destabilising UK-US trade even after their deal, hitting UK autos and pharma exports and pushing Britain to look beyond the US for trade partners.

UK-US deal? Not so fast!

brexit
trade-wars

The UK is squeezed from both sides: Trump tariffs are hitting US-bound exports even after the Economic Prosperity Deal, while Brexit-era TCA friction keeps taxing trade with the EU.

How did the Brexit uncertainty impact services exports of UK firms?

brexit
firms
services-trade
firm-level
Journal of International Business Policy, 2025. With Jun Du and Xiaocan Yuan.
Show abstract Using firm-level data and a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we estimate that Brexit-related policy uncertainty reduced UK services exports by 9.2% a year on average, a cumulative loss of roughly USD 146.8 billion between 2016 and 2019 — distinct from, and larger than, the effect of the tariff and non-tariff barriers that eventually took effect. The impact fell disproportionately on small and medium-sized exporters, while multinational enterprises were more likely to relocate operations outside the UK altogether.

Shocked by COVID: Exporting along global value chains

firms
brexit
CEP Discussion Paper dp2105, 2025. With Holger Breinlich and Jun Du.
Show abstract Using UK customs data from 2017 to 2020 and a shift-share identification strategy that exploits the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment, we estimate an elasticity of exports with respect to intermediate imports of 0.4: a one-standard-deviation increase in COVID-related restrictions in sourcing countries reduced intermediate exports by 3.7%. The result highlights a paradox in protectionist trade policy — measures aimed at self-sufficiency can damage export performance by disrupting the supply chains exporters depend on.

Trade Disintegration and Agri-Food Trade: United Kingdom Exit From EU

brexit
agrifood
The World Economy, 2025. With Jun Du and Yundan Shi.
Show abstract We provide a comprehensive difference-in-differences analysis of how the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement affected the UK’s agri-food trade after Brexit. Both the value and quantity of UK agri-food exports and imports fell significantly post-TCA, while prices rose as worsened market access and additional border checks pushed up trade costs. The results underline the importance of legal enforceability in trade agreements — particularly for agricultural and sanitary/phytosanitary provisions — for preserving market access and trade volumes.

Productivity, trade openness and UK trade policy adventurism

brexit
other

The UK’s productivity problem is really a competition problem — record markups and weak business dynamism, best addressed by a customs union with the EU.

Brexit and the Services Trade—A Longitudinal Analysis

brexit
firms
services-trade
Journal of Service Research, 2024. With Jun Du.
Show abstract Using the OECD-WTO Balanced Trade in Services dataset and a synthetic difference-in-differences design, we estimate the impact of Brexit uncertainty on UK services trade from 2016 to 2019. UK services exports fell short of a synthetic no-Brexit counterfactual by an average of US$23.7bn (£18.5bn) a year — a 5.65% reduction — with substantial variation across sectors and destinations. Bilateral exports fell by 8.5% on average; large markets such as Germany and the US were less affected than smaller ones, UK exports to the EU as a whole declined by 6.21%, while, strikingly, exports to Ireland expanded by 21.4%.

Would a veterinary agreement be a boost for UK-EU agri-food exports?

brexit
agrifood

Drawing on 279 trade agreements worldwide, this piece finds a UK-EU veterinary deal built on mutual recognition could lift UK agri-food exports to the EU by 22.5% within a decade.

Economic disintegration: Brexit, Non-tariff Measures, and UK Trade

brexit
Research Square preprint, 2024. With Jun Du.
Show abstract Although the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement established tariff- and quota-free trade in goods, UK-EU trade costs rose significantly after Brexit. Using a synthetic control difference-in-differences design, we show the TCA had a significant, adverse effect on bilateral UK-EU trade, and we quantify the ad valorem equivalents of the non-tariff measures introduced after the Brexit transition period, tracing their impact on UK trade through 2021.

Why UK and old Europe have stagnation in productivity growth?

other
brexit
ukraine

Structural drag from an ageing workforce and thin R&D investment, compounded by Brexit’s hit to trade openness and the energy shock from the Ukraine war.

GDP Blues: Unravelling the UK’s Troubled Economic Slowdown

other
brexit

Four reasons behind the UK’s anaemic 0.9% real GDP growth from 2019 to 2023, from collapsing consumer confidence to new post-Brexit trade barriers.

The impact of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement on UK trade

brexit

New econometric evidence that the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement cut UK exports to the EU by over 22% and shrank export product variety.

Harvesting Trade Opportunities: Staggered DID of Impact and Structural Gravity of Future of EU-UK Agrifood Trade

brexit
agrifood
Conference paper, International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium, 2023.
Show abstract Combining a staggered difference-in-differences estimate of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s realised impact on EU-UK agrifood trade with a structural gravity projection of plausible future trading arrangements, we ask how much of the post-Brexit agrifood trade loss is recoverable under alternative UK-EU relationships — including a veterinary/SPS agreement — and how much looks permanent under the current trading relationship.

How did Brexit affect UK trade?

brexit
Contemporary Social Science, 2023. With Jun Du and Emine Beyza Satoglu.
Show abstract Using COMTRADE data from 2019 to 2022Q1 and synthetic difference-in-differences, we build a counterfactual UK that did not experience the Trade and Cooperation Agreement to assess its effect on UK trade. The negative, large, and statistically significant impact on UK exports persisted throughout the period, with the gap between actual and synthetic UK exports widening to 26% on average. The TCA also caused a significant contraction in the variety of goods the UK exports to the EU.

UK trade in the time of COVID-19: A review

brexit
The World Economy, 2022. With Jun Du.
Show abstract We review the UK’s trade performance through the COVID-19 crisis and consider how it might be revived. UK goods exports contracted more sharply in 2020 than those of international peers, with a deeper decline and slower recovery than Germany, Italy, Spain, and the US. Trends from 2017 to 2019 already showed the UK’s global competitiveness weakening, suggesting a more persistent problem against a backdrop of productivity slowdown and Brexit uncertainty. We analyse the confluence of internal and external factors bearing on UK trade and argue that boosting productivity is central to recovering from both the COVID shock and Brexit.

An examination of EU trade disintegration scenarios

brexit
trade-wars
The World Economy, 2021. With Karen Jackson.
Show abstract Using a structural gravity approach, we examine the welfare implications of scenarios in which the EU itself partially disintegrates, rather than just the UK leaving it. The remaining EU countries stand to lose considerably more from EU disintegration than they did from a disorderly Brexit. Some neighbouring high- and middle-income countries — Bosnia and Herzegovina and Norway among them — would actually benefit under certain disintegration scenarios, gaining trade competitiveness relative to the weakened EU bloc.

Post-Brexit trade survival: Looking beyond the European Union

brexit
consultancy
gravity
Economic Modelling, 2018. With Karen Jackson.
Show abstract We explore the welfare implications of a new EU-UK relationship alongside major trade policy initiatives, evaluating five Brexit scenarios that vary in their assumptions about a UK-EU deal, TTIP, and new free trade agreements with the US or Commonwealth countries, tracking welfare changes over two decades. The impact of Brexit is negative under every scenario, with losses smallest under a soft Brexit and worse if TTIP proceeds — underscoring the value of large-bloc membership. Losses occur gradually and can be partly offset by new trade agreements, but a hard Brexit should be avoided to minimise them.
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