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The Financial Times:
Brexit sparks outbreak of agreement among economists

27 April 2016

There is a long-running joke that if you laid all the world's economists end to end they would never reach a conclusion. But the debate over whether the UK should leave the EU is generating more consensus in the dismal science than almost any other recent issue.

Economists believe it would probably hurt Britain's economy. They differ on their modelling techniques and their estimates of the extent of the cost to UK households, but those are small differences relative to the normal level of disagreement in the profession.

The OECD's central assessment is that Brexit would cause immediate damage to confidence and longer-term structural harm because of the benefits Britain derives from trade with the EU, foreign direct investment, managerial competence and access to skilled workers. Its central estimate is that gross domestic product would be 5 per cent lower than if Britain remained in the EU, with a range of a 2.7 to a 7.5 per cent hit to GDP. All of these are significant. These figures put the organisation very close to the Treasury's estimate of a 6.2 per cent GDP reduction. They are higher than the forecasts from the CBI business lobby, and Oxford Economics and lower than the London School of Economics estimate of up to 9.5 per cent.

This article was published by The Financial Times on April 27, 2016
Link to article here

Related publications
The BREXIT 2016 Policy Analysis Series from the Centre for Economic Performance can be found here

Related links
Swati Dhingra webpage
Hanwei Huang webpage
Gianmarco Ottaviano webpage
Thomas Sampson webpage
John Van Reenen webpage
Growth Programme webpage
Trade Programme webpage

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