Effects of the Brexit process on the United Kingdom's international trade

The purpose of this article; It is to try to reveal the Brexit process by researching the effects of Brexit on the foreign trade of the United Kingdom, especially the European Union. As a result of the voting held on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom, 51.9% of the majority was obtained, and a decision was made to leave the European Union, and the process of leaving the European Union was initiated for the first time in its history. Answers will be found to the questions of how the Brexit process was reached, how the decisions were taken, how the institutional structure in the European Union was and how it would change after the departure, which scenario was decided and put into service after various scenarios so far. Countries, companies and individuals desire to reach the planned target by trying to keep the risks and uncertainties at the lowest level while making economic plans within themselves. With the Brexit referendum, the United Kingdom has taken the first step on this path full of uncertainties, where no country has asked for secession before and the results have not been experienced so far. The Brexit referendum, which constitutes the starting point of the risks and uncertainties about what the results will be, has been accepted as a milestone, and the foreign trade data of the European Union member states, which are the closest neighbors of the United Kingdom and the Union members, were used before and after the referendum, using the Trade Map. The positive and negative aspects of the parties were reflected by examining item by item in a period of five to 10 years. Within the scope of the research models created, how the international trade of the UK was affected in line with the Brexit process, the UK's quarterly data between the years 2012-2022 was used to analyze it through time series analysis. In the analysis, the data related to the UK's exports, imports, total international trade, gross domestic product, gross capital investments and Sterling/US Dollar exchange rate variables were obtained from the OECD database and the effects of the Brexit process on the UK's international trade were analyzed. Since the foreign trade between the UK and the EU countries is expected to be highly affected by Brexit, the analysis is conducted with the Zivot-Andrews unit root test, which estimates the breaks in the series endogenously due to the high probability of structural breaks. When the structural break dates as a result of the test were evaluated, it was concluded that structural breaks occurred in the second and third quarters of 2020 and the second quarters of 2021 in the total trade volume of the UK. It was concluded that the full withdrawal process, which came into effect in 2020, created structural changes and breaks in the UK's total international trade. Structural breaks were observed in the UK's imports in 2020 and in the third quarter of 2021. After it was determined that all variables were not unit rooted under a single structural break, the research model was tested by means of Least Squares (Least Squares) estimation technique. It has been determined that the rate of increase in the gross domestic product of the UK will increase the total trade volume ratio at a higher level, increase its exports less than the total trade volume, and increase its imports even more. It has been concluded that the negative rate of increase in the exchange rate for the UK will increase less than the rate of the total trade volume, it will increase exports almost at a similar rate, and it will increase imports at a lesser rate. Experiencing the Brexit process, which is the research variable of the study, has been found to provide a very low increase of 0.08% in the UK's imports. It has been determined that fixed capital investments have no statistical effect on the international trade of the UK.