The post-Brexit vote trade boost that never was

There is still a huge disconnect between the reality of the state of the UK economy since the Brexit vote and media perceptions. I heard one presenter on BBC News say the economy is doing pretty well following the Brexit vote. The reality is very different. According to the latest CER study the economy is 2.5% smaller than it would have been without that vote, which is nearly £2000 per household. We are back in the situation we were in before the 2015 election, where the reality for most households was pretty bad but the media kept on talking about a strong economy.  

But why has the Brexit vote had such a large negative impact on the economy, when Brexit has not happened yet. When I talked about what to expect immediately after the vote, when Brexiters were arguing that the collapse in sterling would be a big boost for the economy, I tried to point out that any boost would be temporary, because sterling had fallen for a reason: trade could become more difficult. That was a major reason for the depreciation, to compensate for future trade barriers. (I elaborated here, and talked about why real wages were falling here.)

It looks like I was being too optimistic. Here, from the ONS, is the breakdown of what contributed to GDP growth in each quarter since the vote. The contribution of net trade (the yellow bars) is always erratic, but there is no clear positive contribution emerging.

This aggregate data is backed up by the survey evidence from the manufacturing sector  reported here. Many firms have already lost export orders as they were cut out of EU based supply chains because of Brexit. A recent study from INET and Cambridge found that firms were either not entering into new agreements to export products because of Brexit or were more likely to exit from such agreements. Most recently another study used statistical methods to estimate what trade would have been without Brexit, and this suggested that exports to both the EU and non-EU were not increasing as you might hope as a result of the depreciation.

That exports to non-EU countries are lower as a result of the Brexit depreciation might seem puzzling, but it is important to remember the number of trade agreements that the EU has with other countries, which we will probably lose under some types of Brexit.

What is going on here? Why are exporting firms not increasing their volume of exports in the short term to benefit from the competitive advantage they have gained at least before barriers to trade are erected? No doubt some are, but they are being offset by others that are decreasing exports because contracts are getting cancelled or it is just not worth continuing to export or enter new markets.

The reason is something that trade economists have known about for decades. Trade involves important fixed costs. Supply chains have to be established, or the infrastructure to trade in overseas markets has to be set up. That means that those setting up supply chains do not want to be changing them every year, and as a result find it too risky to include UK firms when various barriers might arise as soon as March 2019. Equally firms selling direct to overseas consumers find that the investment required to set them up is greater than any profits they might only make for a few years.

All this would not matter so much in terms of GDP if similar things were happening to imports, but the most recent study I surveyed suggested this was not happening so much to imports. An important reason why exports are hit more than imports is specialisation. Increasingly there are products which the UK does not produce, so it is more difficult to substitute from overseas to domestic production. In contrast exports are generally competing with producers from many countries, so substituting from a version of the product coming from the UK is much easier. That I believe is an important reason why sterling fell so much after the Brexit vote.

Although all this is painful for people in the UK, it is also interesting for a macroeconomist. We have a ‘natural experiment’ involving a future event, but with the complication that what the future event exactly is remains uncertain. The negative impact on investment is exactly what we would expect: it is always safer to wait and see. The negative impact on exports is rather different from what standard models would imply, but can be explained by well known trade theory. The impact on consumption has perhaps been less than many expected, but that could be explained by many having incorrect expectations of what Brexit means for their future incomes. All this shows how important expectations are and how misleading naive expectations processes would be, but also why it is often important to allow for how distorted information sets can generate errors from rational expectations.  

Why Brexit has led to falling real wages

This might seem easy. The depreciation immediately after Brexit, plus subsequent declines in the number of Euros you can buy with a £, are pushing up import prices which feed into consumer prices (with a lag) which reduce real wages. But real wages depend on nominal wages as well as prices. So why are nominal wages staying unchanged in response to this increase in prices?

Before answering that, let me ask a second question. Why hasn’t the depreciation led to a fall in the trade deficit? Below are the contributions to UK GDP from the national accounts data. Net exports are very erratic, but averaging this out they have contributed nothing to economic growth since the Brexit depreciation.

The belief that the depreciation should benefit UK exports is based partly on the idea that exporters will cut their prices in overseas currency terms, making them more competitive. Yet at the moment UK the majority of exporters seem to be responding to the depreciation not by cutting prices but by taking extra profits. If they keep their prices constant in overseas currency terms (from currency denomination data almost as many exports are priced in overseas currency as imports), sales will stay the same but profits in sterling will rise.

While this helps account for the lack of improvement in net trade, it increases the puzzle over why nominal wages are not responding to higher import prices. If exporting firms profits are rising because of the depreciation, why not pass some of that on to their workers?

One perfectly good answer is that the labour market is weak, and what has stopped real wages falling further is that firms do not like to cut nominal wages. In these circumstances there would be no reason for exporters to share their higher profits with their workforce. So the immediate impact of the depreciation has not been a decline in the terms of trade (export prices/import prices), but instead a shift in the distribution between wages and profits. But many people believe that, with unemployment falling rapidly, the labour market is not weak.

There is another reason why exporters might be increasing profits but not sales, and not passing higher profits on to higher wages, which goes back to a point I have stressed before. We need to ask why the depreciation happened in the first place. To some extent the markets were responding to lower anticipated interest rates set by the Bank of England, but there is more to it than that. Brexit, by making trade with the EU more difficult, will reduce the extent of UK-EU trade. Furthermore there are two reasons why Brexit is likely to reduce UK exports by more than UK imports.

The first is specialisation. Because countries tend to specialise in what they produce, they may not have firms that produce alternatives to many imports, making substitution more difficult. The EU produces many more varieties of goods than the UK, so they are more likely to be able to substitute their own goods to replace UK exports. The second is the importance for UK exports of services, and the key role that the Single Market has in enabling that. On both counts, to offset exports falling by more than imports after Brexit we need a real depreciation in sterling. Exporters will have to cut their prices in overseas currency terms, and a depreciation allows them to do this.

Of course Brexit has not happened yet. We still get a depreciation because otherwise holders of sterling currency would make a loss. So firms do not need to cut their prices in overseas currency yet, allowing them to make higher profits. But these higher profits will be temporary, disappearing once Brexit happens. It would therefore be foolish to raise wages now only to have to cut them later when Brexit happens (no one likes nominal wage cuts). To restate this in more technical language, when Brexit does happen the UK’s terms of trade will deteriorate as a response to export volumes falling by more than import volumes. Firms are in a sense anticipating that decline in the terms of trade by not allowing nominal wages to rise to compensate for higher import prices.

So before Brexit happens we are seeing a distributional shift between wages and profits, but once Brexit happens profits will fall back and we will all be worse off. For Leave voters who think this is all still just ‘Project Fear’, have a look at the national accounts data release that the chart above came from. It shows clearly that UK growth in the first half of this year has been slower than that in the US, Germany, France, Italy and Japan by a wide margin. What Leave campaigners called Project Fear is real and it is happening right now, but do not expect your government or some of your newspapers to tell you that. 

Brexit harm denial and the exchange rate

There seems at the moment some confusion in the Brexit camp: is all the bad news just wishful imagination by Remainers, or is it real but caused by Remainers. Some specific thoughts on the extraordinary Telegraph editorial are here, but one event that was not in anyone’s imagination was the depreciation in sterling as the result became known. Brexiters tend to think markets know what they are doing, so they have resorted to all kinds of arguments why this depreciation was not really bad news.

First, the reason why it is bad news. A depreciation in sterling makes everyone in the UK poorer, because the goods we buy that are made overseas or sold in world markets (oil) will cost more. That this depreciation happened as a result of the vote is beyond dispute. So what do Leave apologists have to say in response? So far I have heard the following.

The depreciation has a good side, because it gives a boost to our exporters.

Economists say never reason from a price change, but instead ask why prices have changed. There are two possible reasons why sterling may have depreciated immediately the vote was announced. The first is that markets think UK exporters need to become more competitive in the longer term to offset the impact of Brexit, because Brexit will make it harder to export to the EU. In short, we are poorer because of Brexit.

Now it is true that markets are anticipating a future event (Brexit has not happened yet), so in theory there will be a short term boost to exports as firms benefit from the depreciation now, but the costs of Brexit come later. But that brings us to the second reason for a depreciation: markets believe Brexit will cause an economic downturn in the UK, implying lower levels of UK interest rates. (In this they have been proved correct). The fact that they were expecting lower interest rates even though exporters get a short term boost tells you that this boost is at best just going to make things a bit less bad than they might otherwise be.

Either way, any short term benefits from the depreciation do not offset the fact that we are all poorer as a result.

Sterling was overvalued anyway

This is an argument put forward by Daniel Hannan. The idea is that a depreciation was going to happen anyway. It is an argument that makes no sense. Suppose you think the price of coffee is too low because markets have underestimated future demand from the US. An unexpected blight then wipes out half the coffee trees in Latin America, and the price shoots up. It is ludicrous to then say no problem, the price was too low anyway. The markets are still underestimating future demand from the US, and when they realise this the price will rise further still.

Sterling is only back to where it was ….

Imagine your earnings vary from month to month because of bonuses. Your boss cuts your basic pay, and tells you not to worry because when you add in the average bonus it is still going to be higher than when bonuses were really low. If you think that actually means your pay has not been cut, then you will be convinced by this argument.

It is just a temporary problem before things become clearer

This argument might just work, but only if you admit things that Leavers tend not to admit. First, it seems reasonable to assume that the short term economic downturn is because firms do not yet know what kind of Brexit we will get, and are putting things on hold until they do. Putting things on hold causes the Brexit Bust, which means the Bank cuts rates, which depreciates sterling. Now move forward to the date where things become clearer, and suppose the outcome is much better for trade than it might have been. (Basically we stay in the single market and accept free movement of labour.) The economy then recovers, interest rates rise, and sterling appreciates. If that happens (and it is a big if), all we need to do is ask who was responsible for all this uncertainty and the temporary damage it caused.