Commentary – The economic consequences of leaving the EU

The phony war is over. We enter a crucial final six weeks before the UK’s referendum on EU membership. A decision by the British people to vote to leave will alter the course of both British and European history. While this is fundamentally a political choice, economic consequences are rightly central to the debate. In this issue of the Review we bring together some of our colleagues from the ESRC’s ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ programme, from a variety of disciplines, to examine the implications of this decision. We also summarise the National Institute’s estimates of the macroeconomic consequences of leaving the EU and compare them to other model based estimates. This exercise is of particular interest since both the well publicised HM Treasury and OECD analyses use our global macroeconomic model, the National Institute Global Econometric Model (NiGEM).¹

¹While NiGEM is produced and maintained by us, the assumptions fed into it, and hence the results, are of course the Treasury’s own responsibility.