The author is a former Minister of Finance
In this column, we have already addressed the topic of Brexit twice in the past (here and here), and in both cases we argued, based on data and comparisons, that Britain shot itself in the knee by leaving the EU and that the direct and indirect costs for everyone (companies, households and the public sector) are considerable.
Today we return to this topic also because only a few days ago a very complex and deep analytical study of the American National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was published. In it, five recognized researchers from the academic environment and from the research centers of the German and British Central Bank (Nicholas Bloom, Philip Bunn, Paul Mizen, Pawel Smietanka and Gregory Thwaites) show that the negative consequences of Brexit were even greater than most previous analyzes had assumed.
It will be ten years since Brexit itself (that is, the vote on Britain’s withdrawal from the EU) in half a year, in June 2026, while Britain formally withdrew from the EU on January 31, 2020, with a transition period until the end of 2020. Technical negotiations on border relations between Northern Ireland and Ireland (EU) continued until the end of 2023.
It should be remembered that although Britain officially left the EU in 2020, the negative consequences of Brexit began to fully manifest themselves immediately after the vote in June 2016 and to a certain – albeit small – extent even before that. This was mainly caused by the high level of uncertainty regarding the consequences of Brexit, which occurred immediately after its approval. It was also connected to the fact that the positive result of the Brexit referendum was unexpected, most polls and estimates gave it a probability of around 30 percent.
An NBER research study concluded that
