Efeitos do Brexit sobre o comércio exterior de bens alimentícios e industriais da Irlanda do Norte

Abstract

The Brexit, the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, was an event of great impact on Europe’s regional integration process. The decision taken by the United Kingdom to leave the economic bloc motivated several researchers to understand how the country’s exit would affect the United Kingdom internally, the region and the world. Therefore, this work contributes to this research agenda by offering an analysis of the main impacts of Brexit on the sales and purchases of the food and industrial sectors of Northern Ireland due to the Belfast Agreement, as well as the ways found by the UK and the European Union in the Windsor Framework to get around the crisis. This research was exploratory and qualitative, with interviews with a sample of the population of two regions of Northern Ireland and the local government data on the foreign trade of food and industrial goods. The hypotheses tested were that: a) with the new bureaucracies and customs duties, domestic products have become less attractive to the European Union; e b) the new customs barriers promoted the reduction of products in the domestic market that require more bureaucratic supervision and companies or small businesses in the sale and export of products to the country. Thus, it was possible to understand that the main impacts resulting from Brexit in two of the main economic sectors of Northern Ireland, were the increase in sales and purchases with Great Britain to the detriment of the Republic of Ireland and the European Union, mainly because of new bureaucracies and customs duties. In addition, there was a reduction in products in the domestic market and an increase in prices due to a change in the supply chains of the sectors analysed.