Brexit trade barriers ‘hit Scottish economy by £4 billion’. New analysis suggests that Scottish exports could be lower by 7.2% compared to continued EU membership.
by bottish
Brexit trade barriers ‘hit Scottish economy by £4 billion’. New analysis suggests that Scottish exports could be lower by 7.2% compared to continued EU membership.
by bottish
15 comments
> This estimated economic cost is from the reduction in trade alone – not counting changes to productivity, investment or migration.
Wonderful being part of the UK isn’t it? Thank god they dragged us out of the EU against our will.
(Awaits yoons telling us it’ll be 100 trillion times worse if we ever dared to go it alone and we won’t be allowed into the EU for 450 years).
Time and time again the obvious economic benefits of rejoining the single market and customs union present themselves to the government and for *reasons* they are all comprehensively ignored.
We know. We are aware. The Scottish Electorate were **lied** to by the Unionist parties in Westminster and the whole country suffers from their deliberate incompetence.
Please can you help me 🙏 🙏 🙏
Do the Unionist/Better together crowd just jam their fingers in their ears, bind their eyes with the 🇬🇧, hum God Save the King ever louder, hope Gordon Brown says something meaningful, pray to a bronze bust of Nigel/Dame Hilda????
What FFS???
It hasn’t been better together since about 1912!!!!
Every other week some think tank launches these reports with totally made up numbers and morons start frothing at the mouth.
If brexit had such a calamitous economic impact then why are we keeping up with countries like France and Germany with our economic growth? Are we saying if we stayed in the EU we would somehow be doing much better than them?
Westminster needs to subsidise that as we voted as a nation to remain within the EU and were forced out. This was foresaw and warned of then disregarded by our neighbouring country.
Ffs we left we can’t rejoin move on.
The underlying report is available [here ](https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/research-and-analysis/2025/01/modelling-impacts-free-trade-agreements-scottish-economy/documents/modelling-impacts-free-trade-agreements-scottish-economy/modelling-impacts-free-trade-agreements-scottish-economy/govscot%3Adocument/modelling-impacts-free-trade-agreements-scottish-economy.pdf) and is worth a look for anyone with an interest in this sort of thing.
From a first quick read, it looks good, and an improvement on other efforts. It uses two interlinked models that estimate what the change in trade should be, using a technique that separates out the impact of free trade agreements from the impact of just being close to each other geographically, and then feeds that change in trade into a broader economic model. This is vastly preferable to other techniques that attempt to produce a döppelganger algorithmically.
The overall impact on long-run GDP looks plausible, at around 2%, but is smaller than other models which include multiple channels – not just trade. I say plausible because some of those models use assumptions about things like migration that have proven to be very wrong indeed, and similar slow downs in productivity are observable across other countries that haven’t left the EU lately.
I do take issue with one impact they suggest is likely, where they’ve produced an estimated decline in coke, refined petroleum and petchems exports of around 5%. As far as I am aware, these products are not subject to significant import tariffs, being complete commodities, and I’m surprised to see such a big impact. They don’t talk about it, which is quite surprising too, as it was our second largest goods export sector to the EU in each year between 2019 and 2021, at least. They also don’t seem to model unrefined oil and gas exports either, which is weird, unless they’re just saying those are completely unaffected.
Overall though, this looks like a promising start to the Scottish Government’s enhanced capabilities to do economic policy research.
Chemical sector down 9% due to Brexit? Jim Retcliffe thinks that’s all due to energy policies.
Yeah Brexit has been terrible and caused significant economic damage, the damage caused by independence would make it look like a small blip
Thanks England. Appreciate you taking us with you
The usual crackpots saying brexit is a great argument to double down on the economic self harm with indy.
There used to be a bunch of people who blamed every single problem in Britain on the EU. We left and discovered it wasn’t l.
We know have a group of people who’s one and only plan is to return, completely ignoring other EU economies. The problems are far more fundamental than whether we are in or out of the EU
Translation: The value of Scotlands exports could be 7.2% lower because of Brexit impeding trade with a market that accounts for 20% of Scotlands exports. And somehow SNATs will take this information, and deduce that it would be a fantastic idea to leave the UK, to which Scotland exports 300% more.
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