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De Britse denktank Centre for European Reform berekende dat de Britse economie sinds de uitstap 5,5 procent trager gegroeid is dan als het land in de EU gebleven was. Bovendien wordt het VK ook nog eens door een zware stakingsgolf ­geteisterd.

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

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%.

C- Customs: Although the picture was initially confused by coronavirus, the effect on trade of leaving the single market two years ago was immediate and negative. It is now possible to quantify the damage. John Springford of the Centre for European Reform estimates that national income is 5.5 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been.

The UK economy is over 5 per cent smaller, says the Centre for European Reform, than it would have been without Brexit.

But so far, Britain's departure has, from an economic perspective, been unambiguously negative. You can take it with a pinch of salt if you like, but the Centre for European Reform recently estimated that UK GDP is 5.5pc smaller because of Brexit, which is equivalent to around £40bn annually in tax revenue, or enough to pay for virtually all of Liz Truss's doomed tax cutting agenda.

Because of rampant problems within the western Balkans, the challenge is huge. “None is close to joining the EU,” says Luigi Scazzieri, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform. “They must all overcome substantial hurdles to meet the Copenhagen criteria, which define the EU’s standards on strong democratic institutions, a functioning market economy and the ability to take on the obligations of membership.”

A report by the Centre for European Reform in December 2022 is the latest to illustrate how Brexit has hit the UK's GDP, investment and trade. 

But John Springford, of the Centre for European Reform, says it’s important to track the UK’s performance against other, similar economies – an approach he calls the “doppelganger method”.“If you compare UK trade after leaving the single market to UK trade before, then you’re not really comparing apples with apples, because you need to compare with other countries. There’s been a big global goods trade boom since the end of the pandemic,” he says.