I have just finished reading the OECD’s report on the the economic consequences of Brexit (see http://goo.gl/mezune). It’s a damning piece of work for anyone who believes Brexit won’t damage the economy or who follows the line ‘well, we can just negotiate our own trade deals can’t we?’ Not surprisingly, it chimes in closely with what the head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has said about the difficulties of the UK trying to ‘go it alone’ in seeking new trade agreements (see https://goo.gl/YfW21F).
The OCED report also provides a useful summary of other studies done (see Table 5, p36 of the OECD Report). All show big negative effects of Brexit – larger for the UK, but significant also for the remaining EU members.
A key Brexit argument against these studies seems to be that they are just produced by an ‘elite’ group of economists who failed to forecast our last recession. In fact, the main institutions weighing in against Brexit – the IMF, the OECD, the WTO – are the bodies set up after 1945 to ensure we never had to endure again the ‘began my neighbour’ trade wars and competitive devaluations of the 1930s. They have played a major role, whatever their mistakes, in creating the postwar prosperity many of us enjoy.
A more reasoned challenge would be to say that aggregate figures can hide important distributional impacts. If we vote to remain, as I hope, we need to look more carefully at this, and the impact of net EU migration on specific communities. If there are gains from remaining in the EU, the gainers can afford to compensate the losers, and should so so.
So to return to the title – have we any economists left who favour Brexit?
gleedsaling 
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