Hello and welcome to the CR podcast.

My name is Elizabetha Kornago and I'm a senior research fellow at CR.

Today we welcome Anton Spisak, who's an associate fellow at CR.

We have recently published an insight from

Anton, titled A Perfect Storm, Retains Trade Malais, Weak Growth and a New Geopolitical Moment.

So we will be discussing the main takeaways and arguments from this publication with Anton himself.

Welcome, Anton. It's great to have you on the podcast thanks for having me Elizabeth

so what got you interested in in this question in the first place what is I guess the

the link between trade and growth and how does everything fit in this indeed as you say

quite interesting geopolitical context. Can you give us your

pitch before we dive into the weeds of your paper? Yes. So what I really wanted to look at

in this piece of research was what has happened to the UK straight performance since 2020.

And we all remember the two big shocks that hit that year. One was

Brexit at the beginning of the year. And the other one was, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.

And many people in the UK use that reference point to draw two very different conclusions

about what's happened to UK trade since then. Some people who were on the

Brexit side of the argument, they say Brexit has nothing to do with trade. You know, it was all the

pandemic. And if you look at the trade figures, they have been actually growing in value, so there's

nothing to worry about. Then you have other people on the other side of the argument, many of whom really profoundly

dislike Brexit and they say, no, hang on a second, Brexit actually explained everything.

That's why the British economy is struggling today.

So what I really wanted to do was to move past the political noise and just look at the data.

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