Thread by @Jim_Cornelius

Hi @alexisconran. I just heard @andrejpwalker claim on your radio show that "medical drugs are 50% cheaper in the US than in the UK."

Here we go again. Lies and misinformation from leavers.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

I just caught the namecheck, re oranges.

@Andrejpwalker we import oranges from Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Israel, South Africa, Mexico and other countries on a 0% tariff. Here is the link for the tariffs for oranges trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/trade-tariff/c…

And here is what you see if you look down the page as of today. trade-tariff.service.gov.uk/trade-tariff/c…

However, oranges are seasonal. The EU season is shown in this table. They are not currently in season in the EU. (I need to look up the source for this table, it was in a thread I posted a while ago).

EU tariffs on some produce changes with the season.

So we should be looking st the tariff at the height of the EU season, in March. You can do this by setting the date on the schedule.

Here is part of the tariff as of March 26 2018. Please note, at this time the tariff is using the Entry Price system so the % tariff is not displayed directly. It's under the condition's link for each country.

I've highlighted the Standard Import Value (SIV), because some people, including "Economist for Free Trade" Kevin Dowd in a Brexit Central article and Guido Fawkes on twitter have mistakenly thought this was the tariff (on different produce here).

Under the Entry Price System, a tariff % is charged (could be 0%) and a top-up is added if the entry price falls to a significantly low level to trigger an additional tariff.

Here it is for Morocco.

So under this schedule for Morocco, a tariff is only charged if the entry price falls below €26.40/100kg. And as seen in the earlier tweet the standard import value (i.e. the market price on import) was €57.30/100kg. So no tariff would have been charged.

This begs a question..

The question is how often does the entry price fall below the trigger price and trigger a tariff.

Well as this research shows, this almost never happens. No cases were seen during the study period. The study suggests abolishing the system.

uni-hohenheim.de/qisserver/rds?…

The end result of this is that we can say with a high degree of confidence that virtually none of the oranges imported into the EU face a tariff.

For Morocco in particular nearly 80% of their oranges,112,000 tonnes, are exported to the EU all of tariff-free.

More detail here.

https://twitter.com/Jim_Cornelius/status/1027561128774303744

And here.

https://twitter.com/Jim_Cornelius/status/1008298636650926082