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I Wonder If They Will Be Right?

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youngmafbog | 12:55 Thu 05th Jan 2017 | News
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And coming from a load of Uni Academics it is a surpriseing prediction:

* Brexit will allow the UK to halve net migration, a major study finds today.

* The cut will provide a long-term boost to wages and help ease the national housing crisis, say Cambridge University researchers.

* Any negative impact on growth will only be tiny and would probably have happened even without a vote to leave, their report reveals.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4089434/Brexit-let-Britain-halve-net-migration-Major-report-delivers-devastating-verdict-post-referendum-scaremongering.html

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We will see in ten or so years time
Excellent, all sounds very positive .!!!
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It does and I really hope they are right.
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/News/Question1531349.html

Another side of the same coin?

On LBC last night Nigel Farage and someone else were talking about the huge growth in our population expected over the next 20 -30 years to something like 80 million. We are talking about a reduction in net migration but the net migration figure will continue to be positive it seems
I have glanced over the report and it seems to me that the Daily Mail is being rather misleading. For sure this particular study suggests that the expected impact of Brexit will be lighter than the Treasury report prior to the referendum predicted -- and this is true in two separate scenarios the study looks at. But the bit about migration in particular is not a prediction but an assumption, ie the study literally plugs this in from the start. No wonder they find that met migration falls to exactly the levels they set it to.

For the rest of it, I think the study is rather better to interpret as an evaluation of two different schemes for developing forecast models of trade. They spend a lot of time discussing the "gravity model" approach, where apparently the volume of trade flow between countries is taken to be "proportional to the product of the size of their economies, and inversely proportional to some measure of the distance between them", along with a few extra assumptions related specifically to the EU. The paper rejects this approach, or at least how the Treasury applied it, and -- well, essentially that's all the study really does.

At various points in the paper's introduction and conclusion the authors make clear that they have "little or no direct information about how the UK would fare outside the EU", and that "the best we can do is construct scenarios".

I am not meaning to pour scorn on the report per se, nor do I prefer the doom-and-gloom predictions of the Treasury last year. What I am saying is that I don't think there's any major basis for regarding this particular study as somehow "more right" when it comes to the utterly unknowable future that awaits us with Brexit than any other study, or to prefer this expert analysis over another one -- except that these experts happen to have produced a prediction that broadly supports your particular agenda, I guess.

One can anyway regard the prediction as a bit doom-and-gloomy, but in a different sense. As the Mail rightly points out, the authors conclude that Brexit might provide little additional changes to the growth outlook of the UK in the coming few years. But that's because we already had a bleak growth outlook, in their modelling, which is hardly a ringing endorsement for future UK prospects either: "Things won't be any more awful under Brexit than they already were going to be" is still a bit gloomy, no?

But anyway. The economic outlook of Brexit is unknown and unknowable. That applies to "Project Fear" too, of course, but there's no point pretending that the "project sunshine" models are somehow more trustworthy just because you agree with them.
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Nice book jim. Any chance of a precis , life is too short to read that lot.

Are you bored by any chance?
The Daily Mail article attempted to summarise a 50-page report and got it wrong. I don't think that writing summaries is always that helpful if it amounts to skipping important information.

Besides, my post is shorter than the Mail article. Stop being so lazy.
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Sorry, hangs head in shame.
I realise you are being facetious but please do make a point of reading the original report. It doesn't say what the Daily Mail thinks it says. And then you'll need to understand the context better, ie what else are economists coming up with?

If all you are prepared to read is a badly-worded and inaccurate summary, it's no surprise that you are getting the interpretation wrong.
Is this the same report by any chance?

"Economists at the university’s Centre of Business Research modelled the economic effects from the referendum and found that any pain from the “large shock to the UK economy” would have to be dealt with by whoever won the next election.

Uncertainty caused by the referendum result will initially be offset in the economic figures by a lower exchange rate making British exports more attractive, they said. However once the UK actually leaves the bloc the loss of trade, migration inflows and job creation will bite, with GDP being up to 5 per cent lower by 2025."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-economy-damage-hit-2020-general-election-cambridge-study-a7511596.html

A good analysis on the dangers of sexing-up press releases, and other pitfalls here - second half.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics/comments/5md4rw/brexit_and_the_cult_of_the_expert/

I can't get the link to the original article on the Centre for Business Research to work. Have you a direct link Jim?
Got to this late... although anyway ymb has shown no interest, but the link to the full report is here:

http://www.cbr.cam.ac.uk/fileadmin/user_upload/centre-for-business-research/downloads/working-papers/wp483revised.pdf

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