Thursday, 5 January 2017

NEW RESEARCH SHOWS MORE OPTIMISTIC BREXIT SCENARIO

At last there appears to be some serious research showing that brexit may be better than we imagine. The Centre for Business Studies at Cambridge (HERE) has produced a report which casts doubt on some of the Treasury's more pessimistic post brexit forecasts which The Telegraph has seized on (HERE).

The report (HERE) may well be right, after all we are still in the realms of forecasts and assumptions but a note of caution is needed. The CBS uses a completely different model to the one used by the OBR and it has only five years of experience and they themselves say:

From the outset we need to say that no normal forecast is possible. The CBR model is an econometric model which uses a large set of equations to forecast future trends, each equation based on data covering the last few decades of UK economic behaviour. Because this period has been almost wholly one in which the UK has been a member of the EU, the equations contain little or no direct information about how the UK would fare outside the EU. Put simply, leaving the EU is a unique event; no country has ever done this.

We will need to wait until 2025 to see if they or the OBR are right. My money is on the OBR.

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