The United Kingdom should leave the European Union

I did specify pretty clearly the economic benefits that EU confers UK. Just for the sake of argument, the fact that EU remains UK"s largest trading partner might have nothing to do with the actual membership. The positing that UK could trade just as much with EU and still benefit by adding more trade with emerging economies kind of makes sense since EU-countries will still be dependent on trade with Britain. However, the study that I referenced to did not only take into account the effects of the single market but also accounted for a lot of other factors and found that UK`s trade with the other EU-members are 55 percent higher than would have been expected if UK were not part of EU. I think that stands as a pretty clear evaluation of the economic benefit that EU confers Britain. You have posited that UK could remain outside and still negotiate bilateral agreements that includes the single market (that ubdoubtedly has been a success story for Britain) and still somehow enjoy all the benefits. The problem is that if you look at Norway they still have to adopt the decisions made by EU while not having any say in those. Switzerland are, as Norway, members of EEA. However, unlike Norway, they do not have a deal with EU on free services, nor do they have an accord on financial services with EU (except an agreement on life insurance from 1989). My point is that either of these alternatives would be worse for Britain - especially the latter because of the financial services that constutes a big percentage of UK"s total economy. If we were to look at a chart of Uk"s total amount of trade (see chart 2 on the source below that I have provided for all this information and for the text above), you will see that the percentage of trade conducted with EU-members have been fairly stable and has almost levelled off on 54 percent of since the middle of 1990. The trade with the EU-11 countries (and OECD) also fell as a percentage of trade. However, you will see that the trade with the emerging economy has grown fairly stable over that period of time and now amounts to almost 15% of our total trade. One might erroneously deduce that this growth in trade with the emerging economies might have diverted trade being conducted with the other EU-members. However, as the study demonstrated, this is not the case. In fact, the trade with EU actually increased as a whole. UK membership in the Union did in fact boost its goods trade overall by around 30 per cent! The fact of the matter is that the total amount of trade for UK has grown over the last decade, hence one might get the wrong impression of the global trade taking place between UK and the rest of the world. The report also showed that EU has not diverted trade from any of its 30 biggest non-eu trading partners. In the third chart they demonstate the probability of EU diverting any trade from any of the other 30 non-eu trading partner is small and concludes that "there is no evidence that EU diverts trade overall". My opponent argues that if we could leave the European Union, we would be in a better position to negotiate and reach trade agreements with emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil. This may seem like an economically prudent descision. However, to analyze this basic notion further, we need first to look at the certain aspects that drives the growth in global trade. What we can infer from looking at the trends of the global trade is an increasing division of labour between emerging economies and developed economies. This is driven by comparative advantage, meaning that the different countries speicialices on producing the particular goods that they are best at producing, thus leading to a combined higher output due to lower marginal costs and opportunity costs for goods which leads to a more productive economy. Because comparative advantage is the driving factor in the global trade between emerging and developed economies, the former have specialised in intensive manufacturing and the latter in high-calue added production. The argument that you are making, however, misses out on one important aspect, namely the economic trend that shows that not only has trade between countries with similar economic characteristics grown rapidly for decades but also that the value of trade between developed economies is far greater than that between emerging and develop economies, and will continue to be so for years to come. If you look at it from a microeconomic perspective, what drives consumers in developed countries is choice, namely a diverse supply of goods with different designs and differing levels of quality. Only developed economies have the sufficent infrastructure, knowledg and capital to be able to provide this diversity in goods and serivces found in developed economies. Since it takes time for emerging economies to breach through the transition treshold from being an intensive manufacturing economy to a more high calue-added production, UK won"t enjoy the benefits of that as much as it currently does when freetrading with EU-members. The process took Japan almost 30 years after WWII and a similair period for South Korea. Also worth noting is that they both enjoyed a more benign economic environment than that which the emerging economies are currently going thrugh. http://www.cer.org.uk... You are trying to disprove the role that EU has played in making peace in Europe by comparing it to NATO, is to compare apples with oranges since they both work towards peace in different ways. Indeed, during the Cold War, NATO did protect western Europe from slipping into the grasp of the soviets and managed to uphold the fragile power balance between the west and east during the cold war. However, it is the achievements of EU as well as NATO combined that has made EU the prosperous and peaceful continent as it is today. The fact of the matter is that EU and its predecessors have contributed to peace and stability in various numbers of ways; through the steel and coal community established in 1954 they managed to transform ceturies old hostility between France Germany adn Italy by the mutually beneficial creation of a common market in coal would create more integration and deepened friendship; In the aftermath of the autocratic reigns that had plagued Portugal, Greece and Spain, EU managed to transform them to stabilized democracies; aided and abetted the transition to democracy of big parts of central and eastern Europe following the demise of the Soviet Uniona and the warsaw Pact countries rapproachment to the EU; etc. Today, EU is a global power weaving relationships and interactions, communicates and cooperates across borders. With the EU, communcation between governments takes place every day and on every level. Companies can operate within the whole european single market. People travel and relocate with, in history, unprecedented ease. EU does contribute a whole lot to a more stable environment by deepened integration and more cooperation. http://themonkeycage.org... Even if it`s true that more students are from non-european countries, it still doesn"t negate the fact that it is a bureaucratic nightmare to apply for an schengen visa if you are not an european citizen. This cumbersome process is removed within the bounds of those countries that are part of the Schengen agreement. However, as I just found out, Britain is not a part of Schengen. Thus, it seems that this argument and your attempts to refute have been in vain. However, it is a shame that Britain is not a fullworthy member of Schengen since that would leave out all the paper filling work for students and tourists alike as well as the long waiting period - which takes up to 90 days! - until those papers are clear and sanctioned. http://www.studyineurope.eu... Sure, UK is part of g8 and g20, so it has some sphere of influence on matters of economy and other global issues, sure. However, since EU is also part of g8 and g20, Britain can exert more influence in these top meetings by being a member of EU and thereby manage to influence the agenda that EU sets. UK can therefore be a bigger global power if it remains to be a member of EU since it not only wields more influence on the two big top meetings, but also in EU as well. Here I"ll delve more into the actual power that UK actually wields. Even though UK has little less than 10% of the seats in the parliament, that is far from the only way of measuring the total amount of influence in EU. Since all countries have objectives that they want to achieve in the decision making process, a way of measuring UK"s influence in EU is to actually see how many objectives UK fulfills. The think-tank that performed the study outlined a scoreboard intended to gauge UK"s total amount of influences on a vide range of EU-policies. What it found was that UK had been successful in 20 areas and failed in only four. In a further 20 areas Britain had been partially succesful in that its gains could not be guaranteed. I mentioned the "patent package" in my last address as an example of where it was deemed that UK had exerted its influence successfully and has thus managed to draft a bill that undoubtedly has created a lot of growth and jobs in the EU as well as in the UK. https://s3.amazonaws.com...