Balance of Competences Review: Trade and Investment

Evidence submitted to the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

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Iain Murray is a British citizen who is Vice President at CEI and heads the Center for Economic Freedom, which includes trade and other international issues in its portfolio. Fran Smith, adjunct fellow at CEI, and a member of the U.S. Trade Representative’s Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee, also contributed to this submission. This evidence is submitted in order to argue that Britain and the USA would be better off if Britain were to handle its own trade negotiations with the USA, rather than allowing trade to remain an EU competence.

The evidence has two main components – a brief analysis of the potential barriers to UK-US Trade in the negotiations over the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) currently under discussion, and an overview of potentially feasible multilateral trade partnerships involving the UK and US in an era when the UK regains trade competence.