About L. Alan Winters

This author has not yet filled in any details.
So far L. Alan Winters has created 66 blog entries.

A few important steps forward: the UK-EU strategic partnership

The current UK Government is focused on delivering economic growth and positioning the UK as an important economic and diplomatic player internationally. The relationship with the EU is probably the most crucial bit in this jigsaw, and the deal struck on Monday, outlined in a “Common Understanding”, indicates the direction of travel: cautiously and selectively rebuilding closer relations with the EU along a number of dimensions, first and foremost on security and defence matters, but also including energy, environmental, and some economic aspects. We will discuss three particular areas that are related to trade in the ‘common understanding’: fisheries and trade in agri-food products, youth mobility, and cooperation on energy markets and carbon emissions, respectively.  We explain why the deal delivers in two out of three areas.  More could have been done, and with firmer commitments.  The document essentially represents a negotiating agenda with mostly aspirational language, whereby the two parties agree to “work towards” certain outcomes and everything has to be finally negotiated.  Yet every journey starts with a single step, and the one taken on Monday is a sensible step in the right direction. Fish and food: Significant departures from Brexit A core, perhaps the main, EU demand [...]

By , , , , |2025-05-21T18:45:18+01:0021 May 2025|Blog, International Trade, UK- EU|0 Comments
Read More

Stroking a bear to get half a sandwich

The UK and the US announced the first bilateral post-Reciprocal Tariffs deal on 8 May, named the 'U.S.-UK Economic Prosperity Deal' (henceforth the US-UK EPD). The document published yesterday draws out the contours of this EPD, alongside some concrete initial proposals for reciprocal preferential market access for selected goods. Notwithstanding the negotiations starting immediately, this arrangement can be called off at any time, simply by the two parties giving each other written notice. Besides its symbolic and diplomatic relevance, what is the value of this emerging deal for the UK? This is not a Free Trade Agreement. At first glance, it looks like a quid-pro-quo “mini-deal” of limited economic relevance that the US strong-armed the UK into accepting under the threat of tariffs. The UK is getting some respite from Trump’s tariffs in the (important) car and the (strategic) steel and aluminium sectors, in exchange for lowering tariffs on some agricultural products such as ethanol and beef, the latter on a reciprocal basis. But a closer reading of the ‘General Terms document’ suggests that it is more than this, and a lot worse. First, as stated on page 1 of the text, the arrangement that the US and the UK [...]

By , , , , |2025-05-09T18:57:18+01:009 May 2025|Blog, International Trade|0 Comments
Read More

Why discussion of Trade Policy matters in the General Election

30 May 2024 - Ingo Borchert is Deputy Director of the UKTPO, a Member of the Leadership Group of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and a Reader in Economics at the University of Sussex. Michael Gasiorek is Co-Director of the UKTPO, Co-Director of the CITP and Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. Emily Lydgate is Co-Director of the UKTPO and Professor of Environmental Law at the University of Sussex. L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the CITP and former Director of the UKTPO. A general election is underway, and the parties are making various promises and commitments to attract voters, and both the main parties – the Conservatives and Labour – are keen to persuade the country that they have a credible plan. Now it might just be that the authors of this piece are trade nerds, but one key aspect of economic policy has not yet been clearly articulated, or even mentioned – and that is international trade policy. In our view, this is a mistake. As a hugely successful open economy, international trade constitutes a significant share of economic activity, supports over 6 million jobs in the UK, spurs innovation, and enhances consumption choices. [...]

By , , , |2025-01-15T12:06:48+00:0030 May 2024|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|6 Comments
Read More

Supporting UK prosperity through a renewed Board of Trade

22 May 2024 David Henig is Director of the UK Trade Policy Project at the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE). He has written extensively on the development of UK Trade Policy post Brexit, in the context of developments in EU and global trade policy on which he also researches and writes. L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and former Director of the UKTPO. One of the most heralded claims for Brexit was taking back control of UK international trade policy. Four years later, this is not widely seen as having been a success. Trade growth has been disappointing, the UK has become less open, exporting is still heavily concentrated in the Southeast of England, and there is little trust in Government pronouncements on trade. And yet there is almost no coherent discussion of trade policy and no evident strategy guiding future policy objectives or the signature of new trade agreements. Part of the issue is that thinking about trade policy is trapped in the remnants of the Brexit debate and substantially seen in party political terms; it is consequently lacking any broadly accepted understanding. This is unsatisfactory and as part of [...]

By , |2025-01-15T12:19:10+00:0022 May 2024|UK- EU|0 Comments
Read More

Do labour and environmental provisions in trade agreements lead to better social and environmental outcomes in practice?

13 December 2023 James Harrison is Professor in the School of Law at the University of Warwick. Emily Lydgate is Professor in Environmental Law at the University of Sussex and Deputy Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO).  Ioannis Papadakis is a researcher at the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) and a Research Fellow in Economics. Sunayana Sasmal currently serves as a Research Fellow in International Trade Law at the UKTPO. Mattia di Ubaldo is Fellow of the UKTPO and Research Fellow in Economics of European Trade Policies. L. Alan Winters is Founding Director of the UKTPO,  Co-Director of the CITP and Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. In answering this important question, different disciplinary approaches have emerged as have a range of different and sometimes contradictory findings. At the moment, scholars from the different disciplines are not talking to each other about the implications of this. The authors of this blog suggest it is vitally important that they begin to do so.   Trade agreements around the world increasingly include environmental and labour provisions. Their presence attests to policymakers’ recognition that trade agreements cannot simply focus on economic issues. They should also address environmental and social [...]

By , , , , |2025-01-15T12:35:09+00:0013 December 2023|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|3 Comments
Read More

A new dawn in public debate?

22 September 2023.L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP), Professor of Economics at University of Sussex Business School and Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory. When UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, spoke on climate policy on 20th September and talked the following day to the BBC’s Today programme, he did much more than delay the UK’s policies for achieving net zero. He said he was changing the terms of political debate. He spoke of honesty, pragmatism, transparency, and ‘getting opinions and advice from anybody’. Nothing could be more welcome to anybody who has engaged with UK policy over the last eight years, during which the greatest failing has been the lack of these characteristics at the highest political levels. I would like to celebrate the change in practice immediately, so let me pose a few straightforward questions to Mr Sunak to which a pragmatic government must surely have answers already. Climate Let me start with the climate policy announcements themselves: What are the estimates of how much his new climate policies will increase the UK’s total carbon dioxide emissions between now and 2050? What are the estimates of how much the new measures will reduce [...]

By |2025-07-17T16:24:35+01:0022 September 2023|Blog|1 Comment
Read More

Is it really true that Brexit has had no harmful effects?

17 February 2023 L. Alan Winters is Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy, Professor of Economics at University of Sussex Business School and Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory. Given the recent discussions about future UK-EU relations and the review of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) after two years, I have started reading the Brexit literature again.  A recent paper – ‘What impact is Brexit having on the UK economy?’ by Graham Gudgin, Julian Jessop and Harry Western (GJW) from October 2022 argues there is no hard evidence of harm and that studies that claim to find harm are biased and/or incompetent! In this blog, I consider a few of their points in four areas. […]

By |2025-01-29T15:40:49+00:0017 February 2023|Blog, International Trade, UK- EU|3 Comments
Read More

Cutting tariffs on food products: why bother?

6 May 2022 L. Alan Winters is Professor of Economics at University of Sussex Business School and Founding Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Guillermo Larbalestier is Research Assistant in International Trade at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the UKTPO. The concept is simple: cut tariffs levied on food imports so the products become cheaper in the UK, right? In this blog, we look at the trade data and discuss the reasons why changing tariffs would hardly affect prices.[1] Only a small proportion of imports pay tariffs. In 2021, the UK imported £38.6 billion of food products[2] (equivalent to 7.6% of the UK’s total imports that year and about 46% of UK food consumption). Approximately 66% come from the EU and are already exempt from tariffs under the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA).[3] […]

By , |2025-07-18T09:40:40+01:006 May 2022|Blog, UK - Non EU, UK- EU|1 Comment
Read More

WTO reform: Plurilateral Agreements

13 January 2022 L. Alan Winters is Professor of Economics and Founding Director of UK Trade Policy Observatory and Bernard Hoekman is Professor of Global Economics, European University Institute and Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory It is widely accepted that international economic relations depend upon a smoothly functioning multilateral trading system. That trading system, institutionally underpinned by the World Trade Organization (WTO), can both stimulate economic activity and help to promote international cooperation in spheres such as climate change and migration. However, the WTO is becoming less relevant to a world in which services account for a growing share of trade, interest in environmental regulation (notably on CO2 emissions) is growing, and digital technology is reshaping our lives. These issues impinge directly on international trade and thus fall within the broad remit of international rulemaking in the WTO. However, decision making in the WTO typically requires consensus from all the Members, which is difficult to achieve when Members have different ideas about what the appropriate rules for dealing with such challenges are. Thus, not only has it become difficult for countries to agree on how to move forward, but these differences are creating new tensions in the global [...]

By |2025-07-18T09:52:44+01:0013 January 2022|UK - Non EU, UK- EU|0 Comments
Read More

China and the WTO

10 December 2021 Michael Gasiorek is Professor of Economics and Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory at the University of Sussex and L. Alan Winters is Professor of Economics and Founding Director of UKTPO China acceded to the World Trade Organisation twenty years ago. Yet despite being a member of the international trading club for two decades, China’s ‘role’ in the trading system continues to generate controversy  across a range of areas such as the alleged support to state-owned enterprises boosting their international competitiveness, restrictions on foreign direct investment in China and the ineffective intellectual property protection in China. In addition, and sometimes conflated with trade, there are technology-related security concerns and human rights abuses, notably with regard to the Uyghurs. The Covid-19 pandemic has also raised worries in some quarters about the vulnerability of supply chains, including over-reliance on particular suppliers such as China in critical sectors. […]

By , |2025-07-18T09:53:34+01:0011 December 2021|UK - Non EU|0 Comments
Read More

Our home

University of Sussex Logo

© 2024 UK Trade Policy Observatory

Site by: Phipps Design

Go to Top