Upon announcing its new free trade agreement with Japan last week, the Department for International Trade (DIT) said: “Government analysis shows that a deal with Japan will deliver a £1.5 billion boost to the UK economy.”
The problem is that this is a predicted £1.5 billion boost without taking into account the trade deal with Japan struck by the European Union, which came into effect in February 2019 and has been the basis for UK-Japan trading ever since.
In fact, back in 2018 the DIT predicted the EU-Japan deal would deliver a boost to the UK economy of £2.6 billion after 15 years—£1.1 billion more than the post-Brexit deal struck last week.
The government acknowledged this in a second press release the following day.
It’s also worth pointing out that the two estimates aren’t necessarily comparable; one expert told us the estimated value of the EU’s deal with Japan was “what an economist would refer to as a ‘back of the envelope calculation’ or a ‘ballpark estimate’.”
