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Truth on trade - How much do China, Japan and America trade with the EU?

2016-11-02 09:10:29

Oct 24th 2016, 9:10 by C.W. | LONDON

A POPULAR idea is floating around certain circles: that you do not need a deep

trade deal with the EU in order to trade with them in a significant way. For

instance, Guido Fawkes, a blog, points out that each year China trades with the

EU to the value of half a trillion dollars. But China is not in the single

market and so does not have to accept annoying rules and regulations. Japan

trades a lot with the EU, but is not in the single market and does not have to

accept free movement of labour (it has net migration close to zero, in fact).

This has implications for post-Brexit Britain, of course. The implication seems

to be that Britain need not be in the single market in order to trade lots with

the EU.

But take a closer look at the figures, and that rosy conclusion is thrown into

doubt. It is true that America, China and Japan trade lots with the EU (our

chart looks just at goods trade, which is easier to measure). But these

countries are much, much bigger than Britain is. So, proportional to the size

of their economies, they do a tiny amount of trade with the EU in comparison to

Britain. By our measure, EU trade relative to GDP is at least five times as

important to Britain as it is to the three other economies we look at. The

single market, in a word, matters.