The frantic hunt for Brexit dividends is one of the few areas of growth in the UK economy, at least as measured by the cost of government time and energy rather than the resulting output. A less obvious fact is that EU trade policy would also be better if the UK remained a member.

The entry in the Brexit debit column is clear. This week showed that UK exports have lagged badly since the start of 2021 during the post-global lockdown trade rebound.Even Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer and longtime Brexit fanatic, found time to count Number of cars and various breads barely consume at home accept The damage caused by his project. The UK doesn’t even have the ability to inspect imports from the EU, Delayed repeatedly Introduce comprehensive border controls.

Obsessed with showing the benefits of Brexit, the Boris Johnson government is pushing hard on childish symbolism such as a completely separate ‘UKCA’ safety and quality mark for products to match the EU’s ‘CE’ ” logo comparable – reproduced without deregulation. Britain’s divisive attempts have also been limited by the trade agreements it binds.EU this week file a case Discrimination at the World Trade Organization against the way the UK subsidizes offshore wind power.

Of course, there could be some real dividends in the future.UK is authorizing gene editing Crops, for example, are free from EU fears of genetic science, which is welcome.

But one gain the government can reasonably claim so far is the relative speed with which it can procure Covid vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021. In theory, the UK could have done this within the EU. It has a regulatory authorization under the aegis of the European Medicines Agency, and it is not mandatory for EU member states to join the centralized procurement scheme. But in practice, it may be difficult to ignore an EU-wide project from within.

However, the purchase only started the UK for a few months in the EU, an advantage that may not be replicated in the future. The UK’s strengths with Covid are the research collaboration between Oxford University and AstraZeneca, and the nice contracts that give priority to supplying the UK. The UK has long-standing experience in large-scale public health procurement, while Brussels is learning on the job.

This relative outperformance will be difficult to reproduce in the UK in any future pandemic. The EU often messes up with unfamiliar problems – such as the euro zone debt crisis – but learns quickly.

Next time, you can bet Brussels will get a huge budget and an impeccable procurement contract – and another if necessary Export Authorization Program Focus manufacturers’ attention on supplying the EU market. If you’re a big pharma company and you’re worried about another round of vaccine nationalism, whose market do you want to be stuck in? One with 67 million people, or one with 447 million people?

The EU is clearly prone to gloating over Britain’s contentless Brexit triumphalism. But if you care about good policy rather than getting down to Johnson’s scoring level, it’s an instinct worth resisting.

Of course, after the UK leaves, the EU has more freedom in certain policy areas to move in the right direction, such as centralizing fiscal policy. However, trade is not one of them. EU trade policy faces serious risks of protectionist leanings, with some liberal Nordic and Central and Eastern European member states privately bemoaning the loss of a traditional free trade Britain as a constraint.

A clear sign is Anti-coercion tool (ACI), currently under development in the European Union.Its intentions are good – to stop the kind of intimidation that China has tried About Lithuania(This is not really relevant to an extreme situation like Russia, where the EU has rightly imposed massive sanctions directly.) But the ACI is currently being drafted and has a lot of leeway to explain “coercion” and devise a response that will It is left open to protectionist lobbying. “Our businesses, in fact, are companies that go about their daily lives in trade . . . they see it as a kind of Too broad, too powerful, too weaponized.”

Another example is EU chip law, in which money is poured into the semiconductor supply chain without sufficient attention to how the money is used – plus domestic preferential supply terms that could easily fall into de facto export restrictions.Post-Brexit Britain could be all about give yourself There is more room for public funding, but this is a strong voice against the misuse of state aid when in the EU.

Traditional economic theory emphasizes trade reciprocity. The whole trumps the parts. The same seems to be true of trade policy and Brexit. The UK has certainly been worse off outside the EU so far, but if the UK is still in the room then the EU will also have a more balanced and rational debate.

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