Northern Ireland’s Trade in Goods in an Era of Brexit Uncertainty: Firm-level Evidence

This paper uses firm-level data to examine the impact of Brexit uncertainty and the implementation of the Withdrawal agreement on the trading patterns of Northern Ireland’s manufacturing, and wholesale and retail firms. There is some evidence that in the aftermath of the Withdrawal agreement the purchasing behaviour of the manufacturing firms shifted away from suppliers in Great Britain to suppliers in either Ireland or other parts of the EU. There appears to have been less of an impact on sales especially between the time of the Brexit referendum and actual Withdrawal. There is some evidence of a post-Withdrawal increase in sales to GB, especially for wholesale and retail, which may be indicative of the benefits of preferential dual-market access for NI firms. While overall measures of the regulatory burden arising from the post-Brexit trading arrangements were not found to exert a statistically significant effect on manufacturing trade activity, this does not apply to measures capturing third-party conformity assessment, which appear to have a negative postWithdrawal impact on NI firms’ trade with GB. These effects are primarily found to be larger for smaller firms, and non high-technology intensive firms as well as for the agri-food sector.