Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T17:17:44.239Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Negotiating the UK's Post-Brexit Trade Arrangements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2016

L. Alan Winters
Affiliation:
Respectively, Fellow, Deputy Director and Director of the UK Trade Policy Observatory (UKTPO), University of Sussex

Abstract

This paper considers the agenda for UK trade negotiations over the post-Brexit period. There are several groups of countries that will need to be dealt with and we consider the priorities among them. Negotiations with the WTO and the EU are the most important and the most pressing in time, and should be pursued simultaneously. On the former, the UK must try quickly to establish its independent WTO status, which will be greatly facilitated by minimising the changes it proposes to its tariffs schedules. On the EU the UK needs to consider the choices between remaining in the customs union, creating an FTA with the EU and maintaining the ‘regulatory union’ that is the European Economic Area (EEA). Only when relations with the EU and WTO are clear will it be feasible to negotiate trade deals of various sorts with other countries, ranging from those with which we already have deals via the EU to those that currently trade with us on ‘WTO rules’. All of this takes time and we argue that it may be worth pursuing transitional arrangements to extend certain current trading arrangements a few years beyond Brexit in order to make time for serious negotiations.

Type
Research Articles
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 National Institute of Economic and Social Research

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Other members of UKTPO have contributed substantially to the analysis within this paper and we are appropriately grateful to them for doing so.

References

Allee, T. and Lugg, A. (2016), ‘Who wrote the rules for the Trans-Pacific Partnership?’, Research & Politics, 3(3), 2053168016658919.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Putnam, R. D. (1988), ‘Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games’, International Organization, 42(03), pp. 427–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cadestin, C., Gourdon, J. and Kowalski, P. (2016), Participation in Global Value Chains in Latin America: Implications for Trade and Trade Related Policy, OECD Trade Policy Papers No. 179, OECD Publishing, Paris, http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5js33lfw0xxn-en.Google Scholar
Gasiorek, M. (2016), ‘UK-Australia trade deal useful as a warm-up for tougher negotiations’, http://www.sussex.ac.uk/eu/articles/australia-trade-deal.Google Scholar