Adam Smith Institute

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Change Britain's claims about post-Brexit trade deals are "basically junk" says Sam Bowman

Sam Bowman's comments about post-Brexit trade deals featured in The Guardian:

Sam Bowman, the executive director of the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute, wrote in a blogpost that the numbers were “basically junk” and said the heavyweight backers of Vote Leave “can do better than this”.

“The extra exports figures come from using EU projections about the benefits of trade deals with countries and blocs like India, China and Mercosur, and dividing by Britain’s share of extra-EU trade (15%),” he wrote.

“This is fairly misleading, because it assumes that the UK could get the same terms as the EU, which is unlikely, since the UK is a much smaller economic bloc than the EU, so other countries will be less willing to give us what we want to get access to our market. It’s very much back-of-the-fag-packet stuff.”