All the talk of trade deals is amusing, or it would be if it weren’t so serious. Boris thinks we can pencil them in on the back of an envelope (HERE), no really! They seem to think these deals will be an unalloyed success for us but actually they may not. We run a surplus with the USA but if BoJo believes we can do the same with South Korea or even India he may be in for a surprise. We will probably run a deficit and the pound will fall to balance up the trade gap – unless we can attract more and more foreign money. And as a Chinese business man said recently we were a door into the EU, after Brexit we will become a door to nowhere so foreign direct investment will be far more difficult to come by.
Also, most trade deals involve goods and not services which make up 80% of our economy. So we will be operating to our partners strengths and our weaknesses. This may not end well.
And we are in for a long period of upheaval. Trade deals involve each party supplying what they’re good at. This usually means jobs in the importing nation are lost and effectively go to the exporting country. Inevitably there will be some churning of jobs, lost in some sectors but gained in others.
If we sign up a lot of new trade deals, one can foresee a lot of unhappiness among workers whose jobs are lost.
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