Shania Bhalotia
shaniabhalotia.bsky.social
Shania Bhalotia
@shaniabhalotia.bsky.social
Economics PhD Student at LSE
We detail this in our new paper:
“Deglobalisation in Disguise? Brexit Barriers and Trade in Services”

cep.lse.ac.uk/_NEW/publica...

#Brexit #Trade #Services
Deglobalisation in disguise? Brexit barriers and trade in services
Deglobalisation policies promote the vision that pulling back from economic integration can help correct international imbalances and reposition national economies for renewed prosperity. A core vision of Brexit was to transform the UK to a new Global Britain - a sovereign trading nation free from EU constraints, and capable of reinvigourating its historical comparative advantage in the world economy. Central to this was the idea of "taking back control" of regulations, particularly in high-value-added services where EU rules were seen as limiting the UK's longstanding global competitiveness. We develop granular and comprehensive measures of UK's departure from regulatory alignment with the EU, and find that they have introduced significant new bilateral trading frictions that have not been offset by increased competitiveness in markets beyond the EU. UK exports to the EU in services that have got these new Brexit barriers have declined by 16 percent relative to other bilateral trade flows. Overall, UK services exports are estimated to be 4 to 5 percent lower, indicating that five years on, Brexit has fallen short of delivering its vision of Global Britain.
cep.lse.ac.uk
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
The UK exiting the world’s deepest services market isn’t just a story of transition — it reflects how hard it is to unwind deep economic integration. It stands as a cautionary tale for the trend towards deglobalisation, especially in advanced economies.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
4️⃣ We also find that barriers to cross-border investment matter just as much as barriers to trade. Investment frictions, while directly affecting local presence, have had significant negative consequences for exports as well.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
This range comes from estimating
🔵change in UK exports to world taking barriers into account on aggregate
🔵impact on UK exports of services affected by barriers, accounting for share of affected services in total exports

We back out loss in non-EU exports from Brexit to be 1%.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
3️⃣ The estimated loss in exports to the EU are not offset by exports to other countries - globally, UK services exports declined 4-5% compared to exports of other economies.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
We estimate these effects using a gravity model with tight fixed effects — isolating the impact of Brexit-specific frictions from broader shocks like COVID or the Ukraine war.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
2️⃣ UK exports to the EU in Brexit-affected services have declined by 15.8 percent relative to other bilateral trade flows, which includes exports of other countries, of UK to non-EU countries and of UK to EU countries that do not take a reservation on the service.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
1️⃣ UK services exports have grown more slowly than exports of the rest of the world, and it is the services that got the highest Brexit barriers that diverged more substantially in the post-Brexit period.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
We match these barriers to export data across 700+ service types from 2012 to 2023.

Through this, we get a high-resolution view of how UK services exports evolve before and after Brexit, and crucially, isolate the effect of new barriers from global shocks, like the pandemic.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Barriers include market access restrictions, residency requirements, and licensing constraints — frictions that matter most in services trade.

In the new UK-EU trade arrangement, such non-tariff barriers have been substantial.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM
We build a novel dataset of granular measures of Brexit-induced barriers to trade and investment in services.

Through legal reading of the reservations in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement, we code barriers by country, service type, and barrier type.
July 29, 2025 at 4:50 PM