In some ways, 2018 was the year of Brexit. Although the UK was not due to leave the European Union unti March 2019, both political and economic discussion in 2018 was overwhelmingly dominated by the topic. This does not mean that other issues weren’t important. For example, there was considerable discussion of the impact of US trade tariffs on China and the introduction of the universal credit system in the UK. However, there is no doubt that Brexit was the dominant issue of the year and is most likely to continue to be so throughout 2019.
Table 1 gives some basic summary statistics for recent UK economic performance. From this we see that UK growth slowed somewhat in 2018. At the time of writing we only have figures for the first 6 months of the year. On this basis, the growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) fell significantly to just over 1% per annum. The impact of this is that UK growth has now fallen below that of the EU as shown in Figure 1.
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