OPEN founding partner Hosuk Lee-Makiyama was quoted by Quartz in an article on the trade implications of Brexit on 5 July.
Now that Britain has voted to leave the European Union, it faces the daunting task of renegotiating a long list of trade deals as a newly independent entity: all the deals the EU already has with other countries, the ones the EU is currently negotiating, and a deal with the EU itself after it leaves the bloc.
This work will require millions of hours of work by seasoned negotiators with experience of the complex, high-stakes art of top-level government deal-making.
Britain is a bit short on those.
“Even if everyone who has ever negotiated a trade agreement in came back to London, they wouldn’t have enough staff to do this,” said Hosuk Lee-Makiyama, a fellow at the Open Political Economy Network, a London-based think tank, and an specialist on trade diplomacy.