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  Those trying to belittle our new Trans-Pacific trade deal bandy around a claim that it will add only 0.08% to our GDP, without ever checking the provenance of this stat. All manner of professors, pundits and polemicists are using it, carelessly.
  It comes from a civil service 2021 scoping exercise which used 2014 figures and is therefore hopelessly out of date for economies which have grown faster than most in the past decade.
  We don’t have a more up-to-date assessment. Which probably doesn’t matter since it would almost certainly wrong. The New Zealand/China free trade deal was scoped to increase trade fivefold in 11 years; it did so in 11 months.
  Conversely, Trans-Pacific boosters talk of a deal worth £12 trillion. This is even more misleading. It merely refers to the combined GDP of the countries involved. It’s not “worth” £12 trillion to us.
  However it does further liberalise trade between us and a group of economies whose share of global GDP and world trade is rising fast (whereas the EU’s shares are falling) and other fast-growing economies are queuing to join. That’s obviously a good thing for our 21st century trade.
  But we should still be seeking a far better free trade deal than the one we have with the EU, which includes our closest trading partners and remains a huge (if declining) chunk of global GDP.
  Of course no free trade deal can be as seamless as the single market. But unless we want to litigate Brexit all over again that option is out for now. Yet we could have a better free trade deal than the one we have — a challenge for the next government to negotiate.

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