Welcome to our latest Beyond Brexit podcast. I'm Emily Kahn.

One of the areas I'm most often asked about by our clients is the impact of Brexit on the UK economy.

So to help me dive into this today, I'm joined by Mike Jateman, senior economist at

PWC who works on our UK Economic Outlook, and Barrett Capellion, a senior economist within theC who works on our UK economic outlook, and Barrett

Capellian, a senior economist within the firm who's been working on economic impact analysis

for our own contingency planning for Brexit, as well as for our clients.

So, Mike, our most recent UK economic outlook was released in November and focused extensively

on the different Brexit scenarios.

Talk us through what the analysis tells us for 2019.

Sure. Hi, Emily.

So all of our projections, our main scenario, assumes a reasonably smooth Brexit.

By this we mean that a deal has agreed with the EU that allows the UK to leave the union and that there's

some early progress in negotiations on the future trading relationship. Right, okay. This would be

sort of analogous to a parliamentary approval of the withdrawal agreement that Theresa May struck

in November or something similar. Okay. If we get a softer Brexit, which involves keeping

the UK in a customs union permanently,

or a harder one, we'd revise these numbers.

But on the assumption of this reasonably smooth Brexit, I mentioned,

we think that growth in 2019 in the UK is going to pick up a bit,

from about 1.3% in 2018 to 1.6% next year. That is all about the return of business investment to growth.

Right, okay.

So we've had three quarters of contraction in business investment so far in 2018.

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