Britain’s exit from the European Union cost Britain at least 6% of its gross national product, 11% of its investments and 7% of its trade. The picture emerges from a new study of the costs of Brexit, this time from the British magazine The Economist.

Britain has officially left the EU. in January 2020 at the conclusion of a losing trade for the post-Brexit era. Optimists in Britain hoped that some of the poor performance of its economy was caused by the pandemic and would therefore gradually change. And that the problems created by the new barriers to trade will be short-lived as businesses become accustomed to the new mechanisms. It is too early to assess the long-term consequences of Brexit. But the data so far shows that it has hurt the British economy.

John Springford of the Center for European Reform attempted to trace the impact of Brexit by concocting a ghost country that tracked the UK’s actions to the results of the 2016 referendum. Using an algorithm, he presented a logical explanation for the UK’s course as if it hadn’t. decided to leave the EU.

Thus, according to his estimates, by the second quarter of 2022, Brexit hit UK GDP by up to 6% and reduced investment in the country by 11%. The implications for trading are a bit more complex. The latest data shows that Brexit did not have a big impact on trade in services, but reduced trade in goods by 7% by the second quarter of 2022.

Merchandise trade decreased by 7% in the second quarter of 2022.

Critics of Mr Springford’s model say the comparison with some countries is unfair to the UK: Australia and New Zealand have been better able to close their borders during the pandemic and avoid the worst effects of the lockdown. America became an energy exporter in 2019. They also point out that the UK’s productivity problem predates Brexit: it already had the lowest ROI of any G7 country in the decade before the referendum.

Mr. Springford, in turn, argued that his approach is better than choosing countries based on rules of thumb. Whatever the exact scale of the impact, the overall message is clear: Brexit has exacerbated an already dire situation.

Leaving the Union also raised the cost of living. A separate group of researchers from another think tank, the Center for Economic Efficiency, analyzed food products that were more or less likely to come from the EU. Thus, he concluded that Brexit increased average UK food prices by about 3% per annum in 2020 and 2021. This is despite the fact that the UK government has implemented only part of the promised import controls and has repeatedly delayed the rest. If it ever implements a full set of controls, and the final deadline is the end of 2023, those impacts are likely to get worse.

Brexit has affected the flow of people as well as trade. EU citizens who previously had the opportunity to work or study in the UK must first obtain a visa. This produced unexpected results: from January to June 2022, EU nationals represented only a fifth of all foreign workers in the UK. And many of them were refugees from Ukraine. In 2015, by contrast, EU citizens made up approximately 50% of foreign workers in the UK, although a change in the methodology for calculating the numbers in 2020 makes comparison difficult.