This paper estimates how Brexit has affected goods trade between the United Kingdom and European Union. Using product-level trade flows between the EU and all other countries in the world as a comparison group, we find a sharp decline in trade from the UK to the EU and significant but smaller reductions in trade from the EU to the UK. However, when we estimate the size of the Brexit impact on trade using UK data and UK global trade as a benchmark, we find strikingly different results. We identify two key sources of this discrepancy. First, the UK's global exports grew relatively slowly. We argue these are not suitable as a no-Brexit counterfactual. Second, Brexit also led to breaks in the measurement of trade flows, particularly for the EU data. To resolve these issues, we combine UK-reported data for its trade with EU and EU data for its trade with the rest of the world to use as the appropriate benchmark for comparison. This generates an estimate that Brexit reduced trade by close to 20% in both directions.

In this paper, we use new survey data on the Irish SME population to trace out the impact of the pandemic on firms' revenues, their capacity to adjust their cost base and their usage of policy supports. Between March and October 2020 over 70 per cent of firms experienced some fall in turnover with a median fall of 25 per cent compared to 2019. The impact of the shock appears uncorrelated with past firm performance which highlights its exogenous nature. Expenditure fell by 8.5 per cent on average with 40 per cent of firms cutting spending. Losses were incurred in over 30 per cent of enterprises with a further 30 per cent just breaking even. We find that about 61 per cent of SMEs received wage subsidies, 20 per cent of firms used tax warehousing while fewer than 6 per cent of firms used lending initiatives. Policy support take-up is more likely among those more affected by the downturn, while the smallest firms appear less likely to use support than larger firms.

Mitigating and adapting to climate change is a central global challenge that may incur costs for many businesses but also one that could bring opportunities in terms of productivity and new markets. Increased use of digital technologies is an area where the challenge of climate adaptation and promotion of productivity growth may be bridged. This research uses firm-level evidence from Ireland to examine firm attitudes and the determinants of firm participation in one or both of the "twin transition" elements. The data is drawn from a large-scale survey including novel questions on energy use, climate adaption priorities and digital strategies along with a wide range of firm characteristics. Larger and more productive firms are more likely to have higher degrees of digitalisation and to have climate action plans in place. Firm productivity is also positively linked to active steps such as measuring CO2 emissions. We find considerable overlap between having a climate and a digital plan in place across firms while controlling for a range of other firm characteristics. At the same time, we find a reasonably large share of firmsthat have positive attitudes to the importance of climate planning but without reporting corresponding concrete actions, suggesting a gap for policy to address.