Hello and welcome to our latest Beyond Brexit podcast. I'm Emily Kahn. Despite having had the rather unusual experience of hosting the Prime Minister in our offices for her so-called Charing Cross speech, PWC speech being considered too dull, the cheek. In this episode, we are putting political disruption to one side and casting

our sights to the horizon to explore the future relationship between the UK and the EU and the

rest of the world. I'll leave the politics for my new besties on Brexit cast. So I'm joined

today by two PWC colleagues, familiar voice of Phil Brown, our senior trade advisor, and Don Boyle,

trade economist in our international development team, making his Beyond Brexit podcast debut to talk

trade gravity models and services. We're also delighted to welcome a special guest, Dr Minico

Marita Yeager, Associate Fellow at the UK Trade Policy Observatory,

and specialist in trade and services and Asia-EU trading relations.

Dom, I'd like to come to you first, if I may. Let's start with the big picture stuff.

You've recently been working, understand, on some research on gravity models and whether or not

they apply to

services. Can we start with an overview of what gravity models are and what you found out?

We can. Yeah, sure. Thanks. And nice to be here. So in a nutshell, the gravity model is very similar

to the model in physics, which is about two objects being attracted to each other when they're larger.

And in trade terms, it means that two economies that are closer together or bigger are likely to be more attracted.

So for example, the US is closest to Mexico and Canada.

So those are its two biggest trading partners.

But you would also expect that Canada would have more share of the trade because its economy is bigger.

And that is what the data shows.

And for the UK, the larger, closer European economies of France, Germany, the Netherlands,

and to an extent Ireland, which is obviously very close, are some of our biggest trading partners.

Our other, well, actually our biggest trading partner is the US.

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