The agreement’s impact on economic and business cooperation

ABSTRACT

Given the close political and economic relationships between Ireland and the UK, and the need for both states to ensure sustained prosperity within Northern Ireland to assist the maintenance of peace, any economic review of the Agreement needs to be placed in the wider context of the island of Ireland and the UK and not just focused internally on Northern Ireland. The main economic aspects of the Agreement are summarised and the role played by its operation in economic and business areas is examined. In conclusion, attention is drawn to challenges that the Agreement will face in the future and the unexpectedly important role that the Agreement has come to play in the UK-EU Brexit negotiations.

KEYWORDS:

• Belfast Agreement
• economic impacts
• business impacts
• Brexit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It is interesting to note that the business community – north and south –argued that the Good Friday Agreement did not go far enough in facilitating the economic and business initiatives that they had been promoting on a cross-border or island basis. Well before 1998, business people had already articulated the concept of a single island economy (Quigley, 1992). At least in this context, the business community appeared to be ahead of politicians in seeing the benefits of more extensive north-south economic cooperation.

2. The proposed new, low rate of corporation tax for Northern Ireland has not yet been implemented (March, 2018).

3. Unfortunately, UK trade in services by export destination and import source are not published, so it is not possible to examine these patterns, other from the perspective of Irish trade, using CSO data (Table 2 above).