The government’s celebrated Brexit trade deal with Pacific countries will “not lead to substantial economic gains for the UK”, top trade experts have said.
Kemi Badenoch signed off UK membership to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) last week, bringing British businesses a step closer to far-flung markets with fewer barriers on the quality of imports.
Britain is the first new member and first European nation to join the bloc – comprising Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam – since its formation in 2018, probably due to… you know, geographical reasons.
The Sunday Express announced the signing of the agreement with a boisterous front-page splash, highlighting the £12 trillion trade boost it could bring which, as Femi notes, could be the biggest Brexit lie on record.
But not everyone was as upbeat about the new trading relationship.
The world’s largest financial newspaper, The Nikkei, ran with the headline: ‘The UK formally joins CPTPP to little fanfare and low expectations’, coverage that was picked up by Sam Coates on Sky News.
And now academics at the respected UK Trade Policy Observatory who have examined the agreement say the conditions for such a hidden further boost appear to be “highly unlikely”.
The Sussex University academics also note that the deal’s small benefit of 0.08 per cent appears to “fall somewhat short of compensating for the predicted 4 per cent GDP loss of leaving the EU”.
“Accession to the CPTPP will not lead to substantial economic gains for the UK,” the authors Dr Minako Morita-Jaeger, Dr Manuel Tong Koecklin, Nicolò Tamberi, and Guillermo Larbalestier write.
“Any such gains will largely depend on possible future expansion of the CTPPP, primarily should China ever accede, and to a lesser extent Taiwan, Thailand and Uruguay who have also applied to join.”
“China’s accession into the CPTPP seems highly unlikely,” they conclude, noting that the country’s application “may have knock on effects to other accessions, especially Taiwan” and that “China’s application to the CPTPP has made the club more difficult to expand”.
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