Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
The UK government has made a welcome commitment to improve trade access for poor countries after Brexit. The question in the White Paper is how to do that. Brexit offers the opportunity to replace the EU’s Economic Partnership Agreements with a simpler, broader and more generous regime that encourages developing countries to export more.
What if there were a way to reduce the nursing shortage in the UK in a way that is good for the National Health Service (NHS), good for developing countries, and good for nurses? We believe this is possible, with something called a Global Skills Partnership, that uses UK aid in a win-win partnership with developing countries. In this blog post we explain exactly how it could work to relieve the strain on the UK’s beloved NHS, and how such an idea might be replicated in other countries and other contexts.
Britain just announced a new policy for trading with developing countries after Brexit. It maintains the current framework of duty free, quota free access to British markets for least developed countries. It is a good basis for the further steps we’d like to see Britain take.
Attention UK political parties: we know you are pretty busy right now, what with Prime Minister Theresa May calling a snap general election in a few weeks. So, we wrote an election manifesto on development for you. Feel free to plagiarize it; in fact, we’ve written it so you can just copy/paste parts of it if you want. To M Macron and Mme Le Pen, your manifestos are written, but you will find some good ideas here too. Needless to say, not all our CGD colleagues will agree with all our ideas, nor will many readers. So please let us know what we have missed or got wrong, in the comments below.
By triggering Article 50, the UK Government has started the process of leaving the EU and will end ‘free movement’ between the EU and UK. But what then on migration? Free movement and EU expansion were behind substantial increases in migration to the UK in the last decade, and likely led to policies which reduced non-EU migration. Our new analysis also suggests the UK now accepts hardly any migrants from the poorest countries.
Agricultural subsidies are almost a complete waste of money, go to the wealthiest in society, and are also damaging to global development. With a Green Paper expected on agriculture in the coming weeks, how can the UK do better after Brexit?
The UK Government has today published a white paper on its broad approach to Brexit—what ’s missing though is a commitment to developing countries on the UK’s trade policy. Having emphasised trade at the heart of its economic strategy on international development, it now needs to commit to providing “duty free quota free” access for developing countries, or risk damaging investment and trade over the next two years and beyond.
In contrast to Donald Trump’s election as US president, the UK’s Brexit campaign[1] and subsequent government response have emphasised that the UK will be outward-looking, embrace free trade and build new economic relationships. UK Prime Minister Theresa May has set the ambition for the UK to be a “global leader on free trade.”
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