Rapport fra Bertelsmann Stiftung:
However, it is certainly clear that a Brexit would have substantial effects on the United Kingdom and other EU nations because the UK’s economic interdependence with other EU member states is significant: 1. The United Kingdom’s trade continues to focus very heavily on the EU:
More than 50% of its exports go to the EU, and more than 50% of imports come from other EU nations. In the mid-1960s, these percentages were significantly less than 40%. 2. More than half of the foreign direct investments in the UK come from the EU. This percentage has remained relatively stable in recent years.
However, the absolute investment volumes have more than tripled since the beginning of the millennium. 3. A little over 2 million citizens from other EU member states live in the United Kingdom. Just over 1 million of those come from the new member states, primarily Poland, but Ireland and Italy as well. Around 1 million UK citizens live in other EU countries, predominantly in Spain, France and Ireland.
Even though predictions are impossible, we can at least say something about the structure of expected effects arising from a Brexit and their magnitude. This study aims to quantify 3 EU Treaty, Art. 50(1) “Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” the economic costs of a Brexit primarily using scenario calculations – thought experiments on the computer that simulate the effects under different conditions to gain new insights.
The most important of these are:
1. The costs of the Brexit for the United Kingdom range between 0.6 and 3% of the per capita income (GDP per capita) in the base year in static models – depending on whether the Brexit takes place as a “soft exit,” or (less likely) an “isolation of the UK.” If dynamic effects that illustrate the impact of economic integration on investment and innovation behavior are taken into account, the costs increase to between 2 and 14%.
2. For the United Kingdom, leaving the EU would yield a potential fiscal saving of 0.5% of the GDP at most. As such, the static models make clear that a Brexit on balance would not yield a profit for the UK and that the net cost – depending on the scenario – could be drastically high.
3. The economic uncertainty that a Brexit would unleash for the UK and other EU member states is huge, certainly for the first few years after the decision is made. The broad spectrum of predictions demonstrates this uncertainty. The resulting indirect costs for economic momentum are scarcely quantifiable, but they could be significantly higher than the direct costs of increasingly difficult market access.
4. A Brexit would entail very high costs for some of the remaining EU member states: On one hand, the UK’s eliminated net contribution for financing the EU would need to be compensated for. On the other, access to markets in the United Kingdom would also worsen for companies in the EU. However, these costs would differ widely depending on the countries’ intensity of economic relations with the UK.
The biggest losers – after the United Kingdom – would be Ireland, Malta and Luxembourg, which maintain strong economic relationships with the island kingdom’s finance sector. These countries would have to accept heavy losses similar in magnitude to those in the UK. According to the results of static model simulations, Germany’s losses would be relatively moderate (0.1 to 0.3%), but could be much higher in dynamic models (0.6 to 3.0%).
Germany would need to transfer an additional €2.5 billion to Brussels to compensate for loss of the UK’s financial contribution to the EU budget if the contribution mechanism is not changed. 5. Findings in academic literature show that the United Kingdom has enjoyed both fiscal and labor market benefits from the immigration of EU citizens. If half of the EU immigrants would return to their home countries, the Britons could expect a lower per capita income of between 2 and 5% long term. The effects on innovation and investment dynamics are also key.
6. At a sectoral level, a Brexit would most heavily impact the UK’s mechanical engineering, automotive and chemicals industries. The EU’s MFN import tariffs are relatively high in these areas. However, the finance industry could be the biggest loser. Conversely, this industry would benefit in countries like Germany, France and Luxembourg. On the continent, losses would be concentrated in the automotive, food and paper industries.
7. Since a Brexit would also have a negative impact on the remaining EU member states without timely and generous negotiations on new terms of cooperation, they have a strong incentive to quickly negotiate follow-up agreements with the United Kingdom, which in turn could limit the costs for the UK.
