Di solito non mi occupo di politica. Però mi occupo spesso di stupidità e di bufale, e la Brexit è un esempio su vasta scala delle conseguenze della stupidità e delle bufale, ed è un esempio che come persona nata in UK e con tanti amici e affetti in quel paese mi tocca da vicino.
La persona che parla, Adam Posen, è presidente del Peterson Institute for International Economics, oltre che ex policymaker per la Banca d’Inghilterra. Questa è la sintesi di quello che disse nel 2017 presso l’American Enterprise Institute.
In cinque minuti, con parole chiare e dirette, mette perfettamente a nudo la colossale stupidità di uscire da un accordo commerciale come l’Unione Europea, per ragioni estremamente pratiche e pragmatiche. Darei molto per avere la lucidità e chiarezza di linguaggio di questa persona.
This is the most chilling explanation of what Brexit will do to the UK economy after December.
By @AdamPosen, President of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. #ThisIsWhatYouVotedFor pic.twitter.com/U4ESjUuVNh— Femi (@Femi_Sorry) October 26, 2020
…it is a negative supply shock in that you are ruining your competitiveness specifically with your largest trading partner. It is a fact of life — it’s one of the few things in economics we can talk about as a fact of life — that “gravity“ applies.
What is gravity? You trade far far more with the countries you are contiguous with and the countries that you historically have interacted with than with countries that are far away. That is true for the US in the context of NAFTA; that is true for the UK. No matter how much there’s been a special relationship, no matter how much the UK tries to be a global exporter, the fact is you’ve got more than twice as much trade with the EU, more than twice as much investment with the EU as you do with the US or let alone the rest of the world. As David Cameron pointed out when Prime Minister while I was at the Bank of England, the UK does more trade with Ireland than they do with the BRIC countries combined: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. So this is negative, full stop.
…Additionally, because the UK had this special status as the less regulated, less — low tax, English-speaking, rule-of-law place (not that all of that was in question elsewhere in the EU, and certainly Ireland was similar) but had this special place, and people liked living in London, you had a huge amount of investment in the UK as a platform to enter the EU, because you were part of the EU deal. That goes away. It may not go to zero, but it will gradually come down. I see a representative for example of Toyota Motor Corporation here. Toyota, Nissan, Ford, all have disproportionate amounts of their European auto production in the UK. All have indicated that they will not expand those productions and will probably decline those production points in the UK when the UK loses full market access.
…There’s a distinction between a trade deal and access to the single market. The single market is covering all those things that aren’t simply the price of goods off the boat. It’s whether your auto meets safety standards. It’s whether your chemicals or your food additives have been recognized. It’s whether you fit standard sizes of various objects. It’s whether your accountants are accredited. It’s whether your university degree is recognized in other countries’ universities.
…the question is, since the UK primarily is an exporter of high-end products and of services, especially financial services, business services, media services, cultural services, educational services, how much do they lose by not being in the single market, even if you have a trade deal? And the answer is, a lot.
Most of the financial regulation that affected the UK was set in the UK and was not set by Brussels, and while the UK was in the EU they had a predominant voice in the setting of those regulations in Brussels. Now there will be no such interest. And that is why we are seeing an estimate of my colleague Simeon Djankov, who runs the financial markets group at the London School of Economics, a third of City jobs — the economic and financial jobs in the City of London — will be moving to Dublin, Frankfurt, New York.
…You can say “Ah, but this is for centuries, over the long term it will be better.” So then you have to think about what’s wrong with the EU economy versus the UK economy. So most of us who see there being problems in the EU economy as a whole (or at least the euro area economy, because frankly Eastern Europe isn’t doing so bad) tend to focus on five things: we say there’s over-regulation of labor markets, there’s heavy-handed regulation of other things, there’s an excessive welfare state, there’s demographic decline, and there’s the problems of being associated with the euro membership.
Now if you look at that list, four of those five do not apply to the UK even as members of the EU. The UK has a looser labor market regulations than anyone else in the EU, the UK has a smaller welfare state than anyone else in the EU, the UK was a beneficiary in the demographic sense of people from Poland and France and Portugal and elsewhere and Romania coming and helping balance out the aging of their society, and the UK was of course not a member of the European monetary system. Even if the UK were to stay in the EU, none of that would change.
So what is it getting? So you’re balancing, essentially, non-financial regulation in certain areas being excessive versus all the other stuff I spoke about. And giving up the ability to affect or push back against those regulations in the future, because you will no longer be a member.
Leave the rhetoric aside. Look at the reality: this is not a very good deal in economic terms.
Now, again, you can always say, “Well, this is about sovereignty, they want to do it”. Again, I’m not fit to say. That’s fine, but you should be aware that there is no economic upside to this.
La versione integrale (26 minuti) del suo intervento è qui:
Questo articolo vi arriva gratuitamente e senza pubblicità grazie alle donazioni dei lettori. Se vi è piaciuto, potete incoraggiarmi a scrivere ancora facendo una donazione anche voi, tramite Paypal (paypal.me/disinformatico) o altri metodi.
