From the London School of economics, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-britain-alone-scenario-how-economists-for-brexit-defy-the-laws-of-gravity/#Author
Method a la MinfordThere are basically two steps in Minford’s analysis. First, he assumes that feed from EU trade protectionism, prices paid by UK consumers for manufacturing and agricultural goods would fall by 10 per cent under ‘Britain Alone’. Second, he feeds this fall in trade costs into his ‘Liverpool model’ to come up with a GDP increase of 4 per cent.
The 10 per cent number does
not come from looking at the actual level of tariffs, which are only around 3 per cent. Rather, it comes from looking at the differences in guesstimated producer price levels between the UK and some other countries using data that is 14 years out of date, and arguing that these higher prices are entirely due to EU trade barriers.
This is really far-fetched. Cross-country price differences are due to a number of factors, particularly different tastes and quality. For example, say Europeans put a higher premium on high-quality clothing compared with Americans. It will look like Europeans are paying more for their clothes, but in reality, the higher average prices simply reflect a different mix of purchases (Deaton, 2014). He ends up comparing apples with a bunch of Boris Johnson shaped bananas across countries.
Minford misunderstands the nature of regulations and product standards. The idea of the Single Market is to have common rules so that a product sold in one EU country can also be sold in any other. If there are 28 different sets of rules governing the sale of a good, it will be harder to sell these products across all EU countries. Minford sees the harmonisation of regulations as a pernicious plot by vested interests to raise prices. But playing by a common set of rules is what has helped increase trade and competition in the Single Market.
It is true that tougher European standards for product safety and quality keep out some trade. For example, if after Brexit the UK reduced the levels of safety in children’s toys to those sold in the Chinese mainland, the average price of children’s toys would surely fall. But this is because the safety standards would deteriorate – quality adjusted prices would not change much. It is hard to believe that parents would welcome this kind of saving.
How Minford defies the laws of gravityTrade flows between nations increase as the economic size and average wealth of each country’s grows, and decrease with rising costs of trade between them caused by import tariffs, transport costs and other trade barriers. This is an empirical regularity called the ‘gravity’ relationship and it is the statistical bedrock of modern trade models.
Minford uses a 1970s style trade model in which all firms in an industry everywhere in the world produce the same goods and competition is perfect. There is no product differentiation – a German-made car is identical to a Chinese-made car. Importantly, trade
does not follow the gravity equation – everyone simply buys from the lowest cost producer.
As a consequence, after Brexit, the UK does not care about the tariff barriers exporters face in accessing the EU Single Market as they can sell as much as they like anywhere in the world. The fact that France is closer than Fiji essentially makes no difference in the Minford world: there is just one fictional world market into which all goods can be effortlessly sold.
If this sounds crazy, that’s because it is crazy. In reality, the UK will still continue to trade extensively with the EU as our closest geographical neighbours. It’s just that the higher trade barriers mean that we will do less of it.