Yea, reality bites.
Brexit Britain has ‘significantly underperformed’ other advanced economies, Goldman Sachs says
Post-Brexit Britain has “significantly underperformed” other advanced economies since the 2016 EU referendum, according to new analysis from Goldman Sachs, which aims to quantify the economic cost of the Leave vote.
Goldman Sachs attributed the economic shortfall to three key factors: reduced trade; weaker business investment; and labor shortages as a result of lower immigration from the EU.
The U.K. voted 52% to 48% to leave the EU on June 23, 2016, but officially exited the union on Jan. 31, 2020.
Over that period until today, U.K. goods trade has underperformed other advanced economies by around 15% since the Leave vote, according to the bank’s estimates, while business investment has fallen “notably short” of pre-referendum levels.
Meantime, immigration from the EU has fallen — a key pledge of the Vote Leave campaign — only to be replaced by a less economically active cohort of non-EU migrants, primarily students, the research said.
“Taken together, the evidence points to a significant long-run output cost of Brexit,” the report’s authors said.