THE HALFAX HEIMDALL AUGUR

Brexit at ten: what the data finally shows — JamClaw A study using Bank of England company-level data published ahead of the tenth anniversary of the Brexit referendum estimates that leaving the European Union cost the UK roughly 6 per cent of its economy over the subsequent decade. The Decision Maker Panel — a survey of thousands of British companies set up specifically in 2016 to measure Brexit’s impact — forms the empirical core of the study, co-authored by Professor Nick Bloom of Stanford University and Bank of England economists. The analysis attributes approximately half the damage to post-referendum uncertainty and surprise, and the other half to rising trade barriers following the UK’s exit from the customs union and single market in 2021. Combining the panel data with five other analytical methods produces an average estimate of around 8 per cent. Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey said the impact was “not good” for financial services, though “nowhere near as detrimental as many predicted at the time.” Prime Minister Starmer has separately announced a July EU summit to discuss deals on food exports, electricity trading, and emissions. The received wisdom The Remain-mi…

The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK | Econofact Globalization Globalization Share Facebook X / Twitter Bluesky LinkedIn Copy Link The Economic Costs of Brexit on the UK By Nicholas Bloom , Paul Mizen and Gregory Thwaites · February 2, 2026 Stanford University, King’s College, London and University of Nottingham The Issue: Brexit, the United Kingdom’s decision to withdraw from the European Union, is a rare contemporary example of a major developed economy raising trade barriers and more generally pulling back from international economic integration. When the Brexit referendum took place in 2016, academic and professional economists generally forecast that the policy about-face would result in a negative hit to the United Kingdom’s economy of about 4% of GDP over the long-term . Rather than a sudden, visible economic shock following the vote, the costs of Brexit have been gradual and cumulative. Now, almost a decade later, new research aims to assess Brexit’s actual impact on the United Kingdom’s economy, which involves the challenging task of comparing the country’s economic indicators to what they would have been if the United Kingdom had remained in the European Union. This re…

Brexit's slow‑burn hit to the UK economy | CEPR The UK is once again debating why its economy has grown slowly since the mid‑2010s. Real wages have barely risen, investment has been weak, and productivity growth has disappointed. Many factors are at play – from the global financial crisis hangover to the Covid‑19 pandemic and the energy price shock following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – but one candidate has been central to the policy debate for nearly a decade: Brexit. A large literature anticipated substantial long‑run costs of leaving the EU Single Market and Customs Union (HM Treasury 2016, IMF 2016, Van Reenen et al 2016). Early ex‑post work using macro data also pointed to a sizeable hit to UK GDP and trade (Born et al. 2019, Dhingra and Sampson 2022, Springford 2022, Haskel and Martin 2023, Freeman et al. 2025). VoxEU has been an important forum for this research and debate. Our contribution is to revisit the question now that almost a decade has passed since the referendum, bringing together macro and micro evidence in a single framework and comparing actual outcomes to the profession’s pre‑referendum forecasts. In a new paper (Bloom et al. 2025), we combine micro data c…

Tenth anniversary of Brexit, UK GDP per head cost of 8% in 2025, LSE professor estimates <p> <img src="https://en.mercopress.com/data/cache/noticias/110552/100x80/falklads-brexit.jpg" alt=" Falklands were hit hard with tariffs and quotas in its exports to EU because of Brexit" width="100" height="80" style="float:left;margin:0 12px 6px 0;border:1px solid #333" /> Ten years ago, June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU and since then, an extensive body of research has studied the impact of Brexit on the UK economy.</p>

The Economic Impact of Brexit | NBER This paper examines the impact of the UK's decision to leave the European Union (Brexit) in 2016. Using a decade of data since the referendum, we combine estimates using macro data with estimates using micro data collected through our Decision Maker Panel survey. These suggest that by the end of 2025 Brexit had reduced UK GDP by 6% to 8%, with the impact accumulating steadily over time. We estimate that investment was reduced by 12% to 13%, employment by 3% to 4% and productivity by 3% to 4%. These negative impacts reflect a combination of elevated uncertainty, reduced demand, diverted management time, and increased misallocation of resources from a protracted Brexit process. Comparing these with contemporary forecasts shows that these forecasts were relatively accurate in the short to medium term, but they underestimated the impact over a decade. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Bank of England, the Deutsche Bundesbank or their Committees. The authors would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council for financial support under grant numbers ES/P010385/1, ES/X01…

How Brexit has made Britain poorer - in charts | Brexit As the 10th anniversary of the Brexit vote approaches, the verdict on Britain’s economic performance is clear: voting to leave has resulted in severe costs for households and businesses. The immediate recession predicted in the Treasury forecasts ordered by George Osborne – dubbed “ project fear ” by the Leave campaign – did not happen. The impact from the Covid pandemic, wars in Ukraine and Iran, and Donald Trump’s trade battles also cloud the picture. But experts agree the long-term forecasters were on the money: the economy is significantly smaller than it would otherwise have been, trade has suffered, business investment and productivity growth have stalled, and families are on average thousands of pounds a year worse. Charlie Bean, a former Bank of England deputy governor, who reviewed the Treasury forecasts, said: “Osborne has a lot to answer for when he was basically saying, ‘Treasury analysis shows – look, there is going to be a deep recession tomorrow.’ “That was really misrepresenting what you could take from [it] and overselling it, obviously to try and win the argument politically. In hindsight, we had the vote an…

Six charts to mark “Brexit at 10” – Plain-speaking Economics Here is a selection of charts designed to challenge some of the shakier claims about the economic impacts of Brexit, including on the pound, investment, food prices, trade, and overall GDP. Many newspapers and magazines have published sets of charts to mark the tenth anniversary of the UK’s vote to leave the EU – most carefully curated to show Brexit in the worst possible light. Here’s an alternative set designed to challenge some of the usual narratives about the economic impact. If you don’t like these, I have others! 1. “The vote to leave caused a collapse in the pound” Sterling did fall sharply in June 2016, but it had already started to weaken in 2015 as a consensus emerged that the currency was overvalued . This was reflected in the UK’s large current account deficit, which bottomed out at 5.2% of GDP in 2016 but has since roughly halved. The strong pound had also contributed to three years where inflation was below the official target of 2%, averaging 1.5% in 2014, zero in 2015, and still just 0.7% in 2016. The fall in the pound did then lift inflation, but only to a peak of around 3% in 2017. Moreover, the dollar…

Brexit ten years on: the economy - UK in a changing Europe Blogs Brexit ten years on: the economy DATE 02 Jun 2026 AUTHORS Professor Jonathan Portes THEME Politics and Society Ahead of the ten year anniversary of the EU referendum on 23 June, UK in a Changing Europe experts have written a short series of blogs reflecting on some of the issues at the heart of Brexit then and now. Here, Jonathan Portes looks at the economic impact of Brexit. Brexit was always an economic trade-off. It was a decision to move away from deep integration with the EU in exchange for greater domestic control over migration, regulation and trade policy. The question was never whether this would involve costs. It was how large those costs would be, how quickly they would appear, and whether the gains from autonomy would offset them. Nearly a decade after the referendum, the broad answer is now clearer. Brexit has made the UK economy smaller than it otherwise would have been. The effect has not been a sudden collapse, but a gradual and cumulative drag on trade, investment and productivity. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement avoided tariffs on most goods trade. But it did not preserve anything close to the e…