Events

Michael Gasiorek and Holger Hestermeyer assess the state of play on UK-EU economic relations and consider the realistic options going forward.

It is three years since the UK left the EU, and two years since the introduction of the UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement; and the EU remains, by far, the UK’s principal trading partner for both goods and services. Recent opinion polls suggest a rise in dissatisfaction either with the decision to leave the EU and/or with how Brexit has been implemented, and there are growing discussions in the media regarding how to improve those economic relations. The aim of this webinar is to assess the state of play on UK-EU economic relations and to consider the realistic options going forward, with a view also to the review of the TCA due to occur in 2025.

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This webinar includes a presentation on the 30th Global Trade Alert Report titled Must Do Better: Trade & Industrial Policy and the SDGs authored by Simon J. Evenett and Johannes Fritz.

Many governments reckon their trade policies promote environmental improvements, the clean energy transition, improved conditions for workers, and other aspects of sustainable development. Yet many critics and promoters of trade reform pour cold water on the notion that commercial policy should target the Sustainable Development Goals. (SDGs).

To take this discussion forward, this Global Trade Alert Report offers a factual assessment of what commercial policy has contributed to the SDGs since the Agenda 2030 on Sustainable development came into effect in 2016 and how much more it could contribute from here on. Also, the Report tackles head-on the apparent tension between openness and advancing SDGs and puts forward suggestions to resolve it.

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Over January and February, NatCen and CITP cooperated on a series of citizens’ juries in which small groups of the public discussed a series of trade policy topics designed to draw out how they navigated the trade-offs that are inevitably involved in designing trade policies. The juries, which were held in Belfast, Bridgend, Doncaster, Paisley, and Reading were representative of their local areas and each met five times. This webinar will describe the process and discuss a few of the preliminary results.

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Dr Coree Brown Swan (School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queens University Belfast) and Dr Viviane Gravey (School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queens University Belfast and CITP) discuss the challenges of managing regulatory divergence on the UK internal market after Brexit, with a special focus on Single Use Plastics.

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