UG economists do the UK’s missing Brexit assessments, and find 2.5 million jobs are at risk

The United Kingdom’s Brexit minister David Davis this month failed to produce long-promised studies of what the effect of leaving the European Union will be on Britain’s industries. Luckily, economists at the University of Groningen’s Faculty of Economics and Business have done Davis’ homework for him, together with colleagues from the University of Sheffield and University of Birmingham. They assessed the risks of Brexit for 54 different industries, using data from the World Input-Output Database.

The results are not pretty. Approximately 2.5 million jobs and 8.5 percent of the UK’s gross domestic product are at risk from Brexit, according to these calculations. That’s £140 billion of UK economic activity directly at risk because of Brexit. The results show that manufacturing and primary industries are highly exposed to Brexit. Services industries are exposed too: even if they don’t sell directly to the EU, they sell heavily to UK firms that export to the EU and are likely to feel the knock-on effect.

Read more in our FEB blog

• You can read more about the results in this blog post by the researchers on the Faculty of Economics and Business blog
• The policy briefing based on the results by City-REDI is available online. The work is part of a larger project within the British ESRC-sponsored multidisciplinary research initiative “The UK in a Changing Europe”.
• Contact: Bart Los, Professor of the Economics of Technological Progress and Structural Change

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