A "hypothetical" study has been released claiming that Britain's economy would have been 8% bigger if Brexit hadn't happened.
The economist Julian Jessop responded as follows:
The lines [on this chart] show what has actually happened to GDP in the UK, France and Germany since the vote to leave.
The green unicorn shows where the UK would be if GDP were 8% higher
Here is the chart:
The position of the unicorn is indeed laughable. It would have mean't Britain would have outperformed the United States! A tad unlikely shall we say...
More interesting is Germany's performance. The transition ended on 31st Dec 2020, so Brexit Britain began it's life outside the EU on 1st Jan 2021.
If you look at the chart, Germany's relative performance begins to dip in 2021, a full year before the Ukraine war.
It might be nothing to do with trade and everything to do with the money the EU extracts from Germany.
Immediately Britain was outside the EU, the southern and eastern Europeans demanded an €800 billion "Covid recovery fund". They'd been long wanting a fund like that, funded by the EU borrowing in the bond markets. (The excuses for the fund varied; "financial crash recovery fund", "eurozone crisis recovery fund", "covid revovery fund").
Rattled by the combination of Covid and Brexit, the Germans and the Dutch caved. They assumed it would be cheap because the EU was borrowing at near zero percent. But then the post covid inflation kicked in, with accompanying high interest rates.
The EU uses member state contributions to repay the money it borrowed from the bond markets. Here is what happened to Germany's net contributions:
Look at the jump in 2021, the first year Britain was outside the EU. How long can Germany carry the rest of the EU like this?
Meanwhile the €800bn covid recovery fund has been spent, but the promised improvement in GDP hasn't materialised. Brexit Britain dodged a bullet in escaping being on the hook for that.