Os custos do proteccionismo europeu

Artigo de Patrick Minford no Daily Telegraph.

The EU's idea of competition is that it is fine to compete with your own kind but not with foreigners who can produce things much more cheaply than you can, such as the Chinese, Koreans and Indians.

Hence great trouble has been taken to keep out cheap imports that could undercut European manufactures, with the result that prices for manufactures are kept well above world prices.

(...)[R]ecent studies have compared the ex-tax price of European goods at the factory gate in several EU countries with the lowest imported price available ex-tax and landed at border. The difference they have found is an average of about 40pc, with even higher protection of sensitive items such as cars, textiles and electrical goods, where rates can be as high as 100pc - for cars it is 69pc.

(...)

The CAP costs us between 0.3pc and 1pc of GDP in excess costs of UK production, payments to inefficient EU farmers, and the burden of high prices on our households.

The "common manufacturing policy" costs us about 3pc of GDP in similar costs; a lot more than raw food because it is so much bigger both as an industry and as an element in our household budgets. This is not chickenfeed: 3pc of GDP is some £30billion, almost half the cost of the NHS [o SNS britânico].