Economic Policy Digest ? June 2017:
Education and deprivation explain the Brexit vote better than immigration
6 June 2017
Demography and education are a much better explanation of the ‘Leave’ vote in the June 2016 Brexit referendum than the decline in public services or recent immigration. These are the conclusions of Sascha O. Becker, Thiemo Fetzer and Dennis Novy in their paper Who Voted for Brexit? A Comprehensive District-Level Analysis. … It might be assumed that the 48% of people who voted to remain in the EU last June, and many of the 52% who voted to Leave, would prefer a ‘soft Brexit’ instead. In this case the UK would follow the example of a country like Norway, which is outside the EU but inside the Single Market. If they got their wish, this would halve the fall in income to about 1.3%. But whether Brexit is hard or soft, Britain will be worse off. The authors of the paper – Swati Dhingra, Hanwei Huang, Gianmarco Ottaviano, João Pessoa, Thomas Sampson and John Van Reenen – from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and MIT, found that for both extreme versions of Brexit, as well as many in between cases that they costed, reductions in budget payment to Brussels will be easily outweighed by the costs of reduced trade with the EU, which accounts for about half of all British trade.