Thursday 22 March 2018, 12 noon to 1pm
10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London

Speakers: Professor L. Alan Winters, Director, UKTPO Director, University of Sussex
Julia Magntorn, Research Officer in the Ecnomics of Brexit, University of Sussex

Discussant: Christophe Bondy, Special Counsel, Cooley LLP

Chair: Gemma Tetlow, Economics Correspondent for the Financial Times

Overview

In the search for a framework for a future UK-EU trade relationship the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement between the EU and Canada (CETA) has come under the spotlight. To inform the debate surrounding a potential ‘Canada plus’ model for the UK post-Brexit, the UK Trade Policy Observatory’s latest Briefing Paper looks in detail at the services and investment liberalisation that the EU undertook in CETA.

We score the EU’s commitments in CETA according to their degree of liberalisation, and aggregate the scores across a wide range of services sectors. This in turn allows a comparison between sectors and helps us to identify the sectors where the UK may want to seek ‘pluses’ in a UK-EU context. Further, we evaluate the extent to which the EU’s commitments in CETA improve on pre-existing regimes by comparing the degree of liberalisation in CETA with the EU’s prior commitments in the GATS. Finally we discuss the extent to which the pluses that the UK may seek are likely to be achievable.