TCA – UKTPO

Non-regression on environmental protection: Making sense of the REUL Bill

16 June 2023 Chloe Anthony, Doctoral Researcher at University of Sussex Law School and Legal Researcher for the UK Environmental Law Association’s Governance and Devolution Group. The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill is part of the Government’s ‘Brexit opportunities’ agenda. It is currently in its final stages in Parliament, going back and forth between the Houses, in a debate on the inclusion of clauses that aim to safeguard parliamentary scrutiny and prevent the lowering of environmental protections. It returns to the Commons on 20 June. […]

By Nick Phipps|2023-06-16T11:37:10+01:0016 June 2023|UK- EU|1 Comment

Driving round the bend: Rules of origin and cars

8 June 2023 Michael Gasiorek is Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex Business School. Peter Holmes is a Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Emeritus Reader in Economics at the University of Sussex Business School. Manuel Tong Koecklin is a Research Fellow in the Economics of Trade at the UK Trade Policy Observatory and University of Sussex Business School. Recently, there have been a series of reports in the media focussing on the challenges that electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers are likely to face, from the end of this year, in exporting electric vehicles tariff-free to the EU. The concern it because of the changes in the rules of origin (ROOs) requirements (for EVs and batteries) which will become more difficult from January 2024, and again from 2027 and 2028 onwards. […]

By Nick Phipps|2023-06-08T15:07:33+01:008 June 2023|UK- EU|1 Comment

Rules of origin do matter after all!

19 May 2023 Michael Gasiorek is Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Co-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Trade Policy. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex Business School. Nicolo Tamberi is Research Officer in Economics at the University of Sussex and Fellow of UKTPO. Earlier this week Vauxhall announced it may withdraw from producing electric vehicles in the UK owing to difficulties from meeting ‘rules of origin’ on EU exports. The car manufacturer called for a revision to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) between the EU and then UK, notably regarding rules of origin (ROOs). Ford and Jaguar Land-Rover have also warned of the difficulties and called for a revision to the TCA and German producers have also expressed concerns about the meeting these ROOs. […]

By Nick Phipps|2023-05-19T13:40:16+01:0019 May 2023|UK- EU|1 Comment

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 Nick Phipps|2023-02-17T13:10:10+00:0017 February 2023|UK- EU|3 Comments

Two years since the TCA came into force: What has happened to UK-EU trade?

10 February 2023 Guillermo Larbalestier is Research Assistant in International Trade at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the UKTPO. Nicolo Tamberi is Research Officer in Economics at the University of Sussex and Fellow of UKTPO. Today, HMRC have released UK trade data for 2022, which we can use to assess UK-EU trade two years after the introduction of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). […]

By Nick Phipps|2023-02-10T16:48:38+00:0010 February 2023|UK- EU|2 Comments

What we can do to fix Brexit and the Irish Border crisis

23 May 2022 Peter Holmes is a Fellow of the UK Trade Policy Observatory and Emeritus Reader in Economics at the University of Sussex Business School UK trade with Europe has significantly fallen off (see UKTPO BP 63 for an early assessment). UK GDP has fallen by 4%. If we cancel the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) – which is all the talk at the moment – the economic consequences of Brexit will get worse and let’s not even think about the political consequences. Is any of this fixable? Yes, if we look ahead to 2025 when the Brexit agreement with the EU—formally known as the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) —is up for its 5-yearly review. UK stakeholders, including political parties planning their manifestoes ahead of the next UK general election in 2024, should consider their Brexit positions now – but it’s not a case of leave or remain, rather a case of ‘tweak the Brexit agreement to something that better suits us’. […]

By Nick Phipps|2022-05-23T11:48:39+01:0023 May 2022|UK- EU|1 Comment

The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) one year on: trade in goods

11 February 2022 Nicolo Tamberi is Research Officer in Economics at the University of Sussex and Fellow of UKTPO. With trade data for the full year 2021 just released, we update our earlier estimates of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement’s impact on bilateral trade between the UK and the EU for the first year of the agreement. […]

By Nick Phipps|2022-02-11T14:07:01+00:0011 February 2022|UK- EU|0 Comments

The UK Regional Trade in Goods Statistics (RTS)

29 July 2021 Yohannes Ayele is Research Fellow in the Economics of Brexit at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the UKTPO. Since 1 January 2021, the UK’s trading relationship with its biggest and closest trading partner—the EU—has been governed by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Although the TCA is a zero-tariff and quota-free trade deal, several reports indicate that it is having a negative impact on the UK’s trade with the EU (see, 1, 2, and 3). While looking at the aggregate effect of the TCA on the UK trade is important, such analysis also misses the substantial differential impact of the TCA across the UK’s devolved administrations and regions. Regions in the same country can be affected differently by new trade barriers because of the difference in industrial production structure and, second, the differential exposure of industries to trade policy changes. In this blog, we provide a brief report on how the UK’s regional trade with the EU fared in the first quarter since the introduction of the TCA. […]

By Nick Phipps|2021-07-29T09:02:00+01:0029 July 2021|UK- EU|1 Comment

Tariff-free trade with the EU: not so PUR and simple

29 July 2021 Yohannes Ayele is Research Fellow in the Economics of Brexit at the University of Sussex and Fellow of the UKTPO. Since 1 January 2021, the UK’s trading relationship with its biggest and closest trading partner—the EU—has been governed by the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA). Under the TCA, UK exports to the EU face zero-tariff and zero-quota. However, to claim zero tariffs, exporters must meet the rules of origin requirements and be able to provide proof of origin. Where exporters do not meet the requirements they end up paying the tariff. Even those exporters that can meet the rules of origin requirement, because of the cost of the paperwork and requirements for proof of origin needed to claim the zero tariff, they may instead choose to pay the tariff. The latter is more likely where the tariff preference margin (i.e., the difference between MFN non-zero tariff and the zero-tariff under TCA) is very low. These problems— the rules of origin requirements and costs associated to claim zero-tariff—could be particularly challenging for smaller companies. Therefore, in practice, firms may end up paying tariffs despite the zero-tariff and zero-quota deal under the TCA. […]

By Nick Phipps|2021-07-29T09:00:00+01:0029 July 2021|UK- EU|0 Comments

UK-EU trade and the TCA update: results up to April 2021

23 July 2021 Nicolo Tamberi is Research Officer in Economics at the University of Sussex and a fellow of the UKTPO. We have updated our estimates of the effects of the introduction of the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) on UK-EU trade in 2021 through to April. The methodology used was described in the UKTPO briefing paper 57 (see the appendix for details). We find that over the period January-April 2021, the TCA reduced UK exports to the EU by 18.7% and imports from the EU by 25.8% compared to the scenario in which the UK did not leave the EU. […]

By Nick Phipps|2021-07-23T09:43:02+01:0023 July 2021|UK- EU|2 Comments

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