脱离欧盟？英国如何失去贸易优势以及脱欧是否应为此负责

How Britain lost its trading edge andwhether Brexit is to blame Sophie Hale, Stephen Hunsaker & Simon PittawayJune 2026 Acknowledgements We are grateful to those who contributed views into the paper and tocolleagues at the Resolution Foundation for helpful discussions andcontributions to this report, particularly Elliott Christensen, James Download This document is available to download as a free PDF at: resolutionfoundation.org/publications Citation If you are using this document in your own writing, our preferred citation is: S Hale, S Hunsaker & S Pittaway,Leaving EU Behind? : How Britain lost its trading edge and whether Brexit is to blame,Resolution Foundation, June 2026 https://doi.org/10.63492/tvju8513 Permission to share This document is published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial NoDerivatives 3.0 England and Wales Licence. This allows anyone to download, reuse, reprint, A decade ago, on 23 June 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU. Most economists expecteda transformation in both what the UK produces and who we trade with. A decade on fromthe vote, and five years since the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) took effect,this briefing note asks whether that transformation has materialised, taking a deep dive For decades the UK has been shifting from a goods-exporting economy towards aservices-exporting one, but that trend has sharply accelerated in the five years since theTCA came into force: UK trade has tilted from goods to services about three-times fastersince 2019 than in the 17 years before. Services now account for 59 per cent of all UK This goods weakness stands out internationally: the UK has slipped from the world’s 11thlargest goods exporter to 14th, and the UK’s share of global exports fell in three-quartersof the 780 goods products covered. The UK saw the largest fall in goods export volumesin the G7, while its services performance was slightly above the middle of the G7 pack.Compared with France, Germany and the US, both the pace and the breadth of its lossof goods competitiveness stand out. Had the UK held its 2019 share of world goods As such, the Government’s industrial strategy’s starting point is more challenging thanhas been acknowledged. The eight priority sectors (the so-called ‘IS-8’) currently covernearly two-thirds of UK goods trade, yet across many of them the UK’s pre-existingstrengths have been eroded or have disappearing altogether. Almost half (49 per cent) ofthe £74 billion goods gap sits in products that sit within the IS-8. This is below their 62 percent share of goods trade in 2019 so these sectors haven’t necessarily underperformed, but the UK’s share fell: world trade in them grew by around 40 per cent over the five years,yet UK exports fell. The UK lost a third of its world share in these 16 products – the largestproportional fall in the G7 – with the lost ground going to China, East and South-East Asia What is driving the UK’s poor goods performance? Three explanations are commonlyoffered: energy prices, China’s export push, and Brexit. Each of these headwinds hashad a tangible effect, but the key question is which of them can explain why the UK’slosses have been uniquely severe. Take energy first: by 2024, the UK had the highestindustrial electricity prices of any International Energy Agency member. Yet, across 29rich economies, there is no clear link between energy-price shocks and goods exportperformance: Swiss and Swedish exporters faced comparable shocks and still grew theirexports. High energy prices are a real burden, but they cannot explain the UK’s recent That leaves Brexit. UK goods exports tracked our G7 peers closely until the TCA cameinto force in January 2021, at which point they began to underperform, a divergence thatpoints to Brexit as the most plausible cause. But the damage is not simply a story oflost EU access. For example, in our 16 illustrative underperforming IS-8 products, the UKlost ground in both EU and non-EU markets, with exports to non-EU destinations fallingfaster. This points to a ‘slow puncture’ rather than a sudden shock: Brexit has acted to How can we minimise the damage? A necessary starting point is honesty about wherethe Government’s industrial strategy starts from. Its focus is not wrong: it has identifiedthe right sectors, where global demand is growing and Britain retains genuine strengths,but in most of them the UK’s advantage is eroding, so the policy measures requiredto defend, never mind grow their market share, is much bigger than acknowledged.The recent shift towards services should not itself be viewed as a problem: countries So doubling down on these strengths make perfect sense. Instead, the problem for theUK is the broad underperformance of goods sectors, including in those sectors we have Our diagnosis is that the industrial strategy either has too little jam or too much toast:eight sectors covering nearly two-thirds of goods trade cannot all be priorities. Instead,th